Patrick Dent is the associate dean for academic affairs for the USC Iovine and Young Academy and a professor of teaching at USC. He has taught at USC since 1999, including teaching in the Academy since its founding and 15 years in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
Professor Dent believes in an intersectional approach to teaching development. While engineering is clearly the core domain -- from programming and scripting to data science to computer engineering -- design, business and communication are integral to successful dev projects ranging from web and mobile development to physical computing to machine intelligence, and development in many areas such as XR and User Experience Design inherently require simultaneous integration of multiple domains.
Professor Dent brings to his teaching and curriculum development more than 20 years of professional experience in disciplines ranging from programming and scripting to database systems and administration to web design and publishing. He has taught new media, Web development, database and programming courses at the University of Southern California since 1999. Dent has developed courses, degrees and curricula at the graduate and undergrad level across three different schools at USC. His background beyond teaching includes working in graphic and web design, database and information systems, and as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer.