Portrait of Friday Emmanuel JamesFriday Emmanuel James

Teaching Assistant Professor

Contact information

2163 Engineering Hall
785-532-7735
fejames@k-state.edu

Education

  • Ph.D., Computer Science, Kansas State University, 2025
  • M.S., Computer Science, Kansas State University, 2021
  • M.S., Statistics, University of Ilorin - Nigeria, 2015
  • B.S., Statistics and Computer Science, University of Ilorin - Nigeria, 2009

Professional experience

Friday Emmanuel James is a teaching assistant professor in the computer science department at Kansas State University, where he currently teaches introductory programming and data structures. He previously served as a graduate teaching assistant, research associate with the KONCORDANT Lab at K-State, and as a graduate research assistant with the ALT+CS Lab at K-State, where he built an automated keystroke-analytics tool to identify struggling programmers and led teacher-PD survey design and analysis for Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) projects.

James also has industry experience as a quantitative research/trading intern at JPMorgan Chase & Co., where he queried large futures datasets in KDB+/Q, built a VWMA trade-direction model and prototyped options P&L classification model. Earlier in his career, he spent seven years in Nigeria as a lecturer in mathematics and statistics and one year in the operations department of Zenith Bank Plc, Nigeria.

Research

James’ research sits at the intersection of computer science education and data science. He designs tools and analytics that turn students’ keystrokes into actionable code-progress visualizations and early warning signals for instructor intervention. A second thread investigates broadening participation in computing through teacher-training and program evaluation, including pre and post-survey instrumentation and analysis for rural-context CS initiatives.

James also explores small-data AI methods – ontology modeling and relationship extraction. Prior to delving into computer science education research, his previous research cut across mathematical and statistical modeling with applications in economics and demography.

Academic highlights

At K-State, James has taught CIS 300 – Data and Program Structures, CIS 111 – Introduction to Programming and has previously been a teaching assistant for CIS 200 – Programming Fundamentals using JAVA. Prior to joining K-State, he taught a range of mathematics and statistics courses including calculus, probability, inference, operations research, survey methods and statistics for biological/agricultural sciences. His recognitions include Graduate Student of the Month for the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering (April 2025), an Outstanding Reviewer Award from SIGCSE (2025), multiple travel and training scholarships, and ongoing reviewer service for ASEE, SIGCSE and Elsevier.