Faculty of Computing and Information Science The college came out of the
Faculty of Computing and Information Science, which was established in 1999 to unify computer science-related efforts throughout the university. The new faculty's first dean was
Robert L. Constable, a longtime professor of computer science at Cornell who specialized in connecting computer programs with mathematical proof systems. this was seen as critical given the field's increasingly widespread importance to nearly every area of study at the university. A $25 million donation from the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006 led to the construction of the building named after couple, which opened in 2014. When he stepped down from the post, Provost
Biddy Martin said that Constable had succeeded in giving computing reach into areas as different as architecture, history, plant science, and psychology. According to Cornell professors and administrators, the Faculty of Computing and Information Science was a "pioneer" in devising this structure, and other universities have since emulated aspects of it. As an example of how the Faculty of Computing and Information Science emphasized the value of multidisciplinary studies, Indeed, by 2020 some 43 percent of students majoring in CIS were female, a figure well above typical for the United States. Then when the college was created later that year, she became the first dean of it. Bowers, a liberal arts alumnus of Cornell, had been the head of personnel at
Intel during a period of rapid growth in the early 1970s; subsequently married
Robert Noyce, the cofounder of Intel; was vice president for human resources at
Apple Computer in the early 1980s; and later became a philanthropist who chaired the
Noyce Foundation following her husband's death. She had frequently donated to Cornell in the past.. The building was partially funded by a $10 million donation from the two founders of
Wayfair, both Cornell alumni, as well as from Bowers. Construction was on the site of
Hoy Field, the longtime
varsity baseball team diamond (which will be relocated further out from the central campus, at some loss of convenience and tradition). The new building is intended to help handle a factor-of-six increase in computer and information science enrollments during the previous decade. Graduate student programs in the college take place both in Ithaca and at the
Cornell Tech campus in New York City. By 2022 there were 62 full-time faculty members in the Department of Computer Science, with 49 in Ithaca and 13 in New York City. There were 42 full-time faculty in the Department of Information Science, and 18 tenure or tenure-track positions in the Department of Statistics and Data Science. By 2022, there were 2,000 students taking majors in the college, and 76 percent of all undergraduate students were taking at least one course in CIS. A new 135,000 square-foot building is scheduled to open in 2025 to help accommodate the rapidly increasing enrollments in computing and information science subjects. Bala was named Cornell's 17th provost on January 1, 2025. == Rankings ==