Technologist and Rutgers alumnus Jimmy Bruno to Join the SC&I Faculty
James (Jimmy) Bruno (he/him), a technologist with more than 20 years of industry experience spanning information technology, educational measurement, and artificial intelligence, will join the Library and Information Science Department in Fall 2026. He will teach undergraduate courses for the Information Technology and Informatics major in Python programming and data curation and management.
Chair and Associate Professor of Library and Information Science Rebecca Reynolds said, “Our department is so fortunate to welcome Jimmy Bruno as an assistant teaching professor. We can’t wait to warmly welcome him to campus as a new colleague, and for our students, especially, to benefit very soon from his arrival and teaching. We are grateful to the SC&I Dean's office, and all LIS faculty for their active engagement and support in this important search.”
Having spent a decade working in information technology for performing arts organizations, Bruno moved to Educational Testing Service (ETS), where he researched and implemented natural language processing applications for language learning and assessment. Most recently, he has served as an AI Scientist at Pearson, where he led the development of automated scoring and feedback systems for middle school writing.
"Having witnessed the evolution and impact of large language models and the explosion of artificial intelligence in public discourse," Bruno said, "I am passionate about AI literacy and excited to bring my interdisciplinary experience in programming, language technology, and applied AI into the classroom."
An alumnus, Bruno earned an M.A. in linguistics from Rutgers-New Brunswick and taught in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He also holds a second master’s degree in computational linguistics from the University of Washington, which he earned while working at ETS.
Read our Q&A with Bruno to learn how his career began, the ways computational linguistics and AI are connected, and why he is looking forward to returning to the Banks.
SC&I: How did you first become interested in information technology, and what led you to expand into artificial intelligence?
JB: It was all a series of happy accidents, like most things in my life. I was working in a ticket office at a performing arts venue in Philadelphia, and I began to tinker with our customer relations management (CRM) system as I was investigating customer issues. I enjoyed the problem- solving, and I seemed to have some knack for technology. Eventually the IT manager hired me as an official IT person, which was a fantastic career development for me, but I think she really wanted to keep a closer eye on what I was doing in the system. [For what led me to AI, see the question about my career path below.]
How did your graduate training in linguistics and computational linguistics shape your career path?
JB: It’s another case of happy accidents. I entered graduate school thinking I would be a linguistics professor, but I made a decision to leave the Ph.D. program without finishing my dissertation (a status informally known as ABD: all but dissertation). I happened upon a job at Educational Testing Service in a research and development group. The group was working on applying natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to language learning and assessment, and it turned out that my training in linguistics was valuable, especially in the context of applications for people who spoke English as a second language. The work was fascinating, and I was hooked.
A major challenge I faced was that NLP and machine learning were highly technical and mathy. (Today, they’re more popularly known collectively as “AI,” but we really didn’t call it that then.) I soon realized that there were limits on the kind of work I was able to do without more formal education, so I decided to go back to school for training that was directly relevant to the field I was working in. I didn’t have the math and statistics background I needed to apply to master’s programs, but I eventually got what I needed by taking courses at Mercer County Community College. (And yes, I totally cried over my math homework some nights, as a grown adult, I am not ashamed to admit.) I eventually got into the program in computational linguistics at the University of Washington and finished it while I was working full-time.
SC&I: What do you enjoy most about teaching and working with students?
JB: I enjoy the human interaction in a safe space. I like facilitating practical exploration, where we make lots of mistakes and get a lot of stuff wrong. That leads to a lot of learning and eventually getting lots of stuff right. I also find that teaching deepens my own understanding and appreciation.
SC&I: What are the most important ideas or skills you hope students take away from your classes?
JB: I hope that students come away with a good eye for critically making sense of data, and a solid foundation of practical programming skills. Especially in an age when generative AI is available for data automation tasks, the world needs people with the skills to evaluate AI-based solutions and make good implementation choices (some of which may not involve AI at all). It also pays to know how to navigate a codebase and evaluate systems.
SC&I: What are you most excited about as you return to Rutgers?
JB: I am most excited by the opportunity to make human impact. Over the past 20 years, I’ve built some technology that I’m proud of, but I feel the most gratified when I think about the people I’ve mentored and the careers I helped launch. I am extremely excited to help Rutgers students develop as information professionals and as informed consumers and builders of technology.
