In 2017, it was announced by SIGCSE that Bell would receive the 2018 award for 'Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education'.

[3] He completed his PhD at the University of Canterbury, with a thesis titled A unifying theory and improvements for existing approaches to text compression.

[4] Bell joined the staff and rose to professor and head of department.

[6] In the 2024 New Year Honours, Bell was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to computer science education.

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