Professor Zingaro joined the Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga in 2013 and has been an Assistant Professor since 2014. His current research involves the design of Concept Inventories for measuring and improving students’ conceptual understanding of core Computer Science topics. Professor Zingaro is internationally recognized for his expertise in the application of Peer Instruction (PI) – an active-learning approach using clickers – to Computer Science courses which has transformed the undergraduate academic experience at both UTM and beyond the University of Toronto. He has won numerous awards for his work in PI, including the Best Paper award at the Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education Technical Symposium (SIGCSE) for a large-scale analysis of PI data across multiple universities in 2016. Most recently, he was recognized by a panel of computing education researchers as having one of the top twenty papers in the 50-year history of the SIGCSE symposium.

Professor Zingaro has supervised over 70 research students on projects spanning video game design, Computer Science education research and algorithms, and is well known for his unique and interactive approach to teaching in the classroom. At UTM, he has lead a community of practice for the Teaching-Learning Collaboration for faculty members and earned a Best Poster award for his collaborative work in evaluating the use of the new Active Learning classrooms. Professor Zingaro has also been recognized multiple times by the Office of Student Transition and Student Life for his contributions to new student engagement.