Dale Reed is a clinical professor of computer science at UIC. In partnership with his colleague Elena Lathos, Reed helped to increase undergraduate computer science enrollment from 187 students in 2005 to more than 1,500 today, placing UIC on the forefront of a national wave of growth. Reed has given more than 300 presentations to more than 10,000 high school students over seven years, encouraging them to consider a future in computing. He double-majored in English and computer science at North Park University and obtained his PhD in computer science at Northwestern University.

Reed has long been invested in computer science education for underrepresented minorities and has received more than $2 million in grants to develop programs for this purpose. Fluent in Spanish, he was the principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded Summer Science Camp from 1992 to 1996; 90 out of 100 inner-city Chicago middle school students who participated indicated an increased interest in STEM careers after completing the program. As co-principal investigator on the CS Scholars S-STEM grant, also funded by NSF, Reed recruited and nurtured 27 Latino, African-American, and female students in their computer science education at UIC; 86 percent of them went on to pursue tech careers.

As a founding member of the Chicago Computer Science Teachers Association, Reed ran Google-funded “CS4HS” seminars for multiple years and was part of the team that worked from 2009 to 2016 to ensure that computer science would be a high school graduation requirement in the Chicago Public Schools. Reed has been involved with the replication of the Los Angeles Exploring Computer Science grant in Chicago and was co-principal investigator on the NSF CE21 Taste of Computing grant and the ongoing NSF CafeCS grant, working to increase equity in CS education. Reed is a product of the early version of the ECS Facilitator in Development program and is now a national ECS Professional Development mentor facilitator. He was a member of the College Board Development Committee for three years, helping to establish the new AP CS Principles course. Reed joined the AnitaB.org board of trustees in October 2019.

Reed can juggle and ride the unicycle, though not yet at the same time, and rides a skateboard or folding bike around campus.