Alison is the former co-chair of her department's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee, where she worked to improve the experience of women and other underrepresented groups in the department. As a Provost's Teaching Fellow, she developed a series of micro-workshops to help faculty better understand the experience of their underrepresented students. The materials for those workshops have now been shared across the campus.
Alison also coordinates outreach to local K-12 classrooms through her department's Coding in the Classroom program, which she co-founded and now serves as faculty chair, and serves as the Lab Director for UT Computer Science's Summer Academy for Women, formerly First Bytes, week-long camps that introduce high school girls to computer science.
Alison earned both her Master's and her Ph.D. in the UT Austin Department of Computer Science, after earning her Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is married with three children (two boys, 16 and 12, and a girl, who is 9).