About me

I am on maternity leave for the Spring 2025 semester.

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), a member of the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) at UTA, the faculty advisor for UTA’s SWE club and a member of the College of Engineering Arlington Women in Engineering organization (COE AWE). Here is my current CV. I am a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the UTA CSE department Rising Star Research Award.

I am lead professor of SCOPE lab which focuses on improving techniques to show the correctness of all program executions. You can explore our projects and see the types of things SCOPE lab gets up too.

I obtained my PhD in the Software Verification, Validation and Testing (SVVAT) group at the University of Texas at Austin (hook’em) in 2017. My adviser is Sarfraz Khurshid. I obtained my M.S. degree in software engineering at UT Austin in 2014 and my B.S. degree in software engineering from The University of Texas at Dallas in 2012 (whoosh). My PhD dissertation can be found here.

I was a speaker at NSF’s CISE Career Workshop 2024 along with 3 other past CAREER NSF recipients - all our talks and slides are posted online. Best of luck to all future PIs applying for the CAREER NSF - I hope our experiences are helpful!!

Research Interest

My main goal is to improve software reliability by focusing on:

• Automated Software Engineering: Test/Oracle Generation, Automated Bug Localization and Repair, Regression Testing, and Mutation Testing
• Formal Methods and Programming Languages: Model Based Testing, First-Order Logic, Program Synthesis, Model Checking and Symbolic Execution
• Upcoming Service: ISSRE 2025 (Organizing Committee), ASE 2025 (PC Member), MODELS 2025 Workshops (PC Member), NSF Panel Reviewer.

News.

• April 2025: Recipient of the UTA College of Engineering “Outstanding Early Career Faculty” Award
• March 2025: My second PhD student defended her dissertation. Congratulations to Dr. Anahita Samadi! She will start a Post-Doc at UT Southwestern in May with Dr. Florence Chiang.
• February 2025: One REU project “Automated Verification of Historical Map Translations into Vector-Based GIS Data” got selected for departmental support. Thank you CSE@UTA! And congrats Talia!
• Janurary 2025: One paper accepted in FormaliSE 2025. Congratulations Ana and Mohammad!
• December 2024: One paper accepted in LLM4Code 2025. Congratulations Sanyogita and Anahita!
• November 2024: My first PhD student defended her dissertation! Congratulations Dr. Ana Jovanovic on successfully defending her dissertation titled “Improving the Accuracy of Software Models Using Refinement and Mutation Testing”
• November 2024: Recipient of the UTA CSE department “Rising Star” Research Award
• October 2024: Our invited paper “Mutation testing for temporal alloy models (extended version)” has been published in SySoM.
• October 2024: Judge for HackUTA.
• September 2024: Presented our paper at MODELS 2024.
• August 2024: Our paper “Right or Wrong – Understanding How Users Write Software Models in Alloy” accepted into SEFM 2024.
• June 2024: Our Seminar “Specification Engineering: Foundations for the Future of Software Development” has been accepted as a 5-day Dagstuhl Seminar. I’ll be an organizer along with Marsha Chechik, Eunsuk Kang, Shahar Maoz and Jan Oliver Ringert.
• June 2024: One paper “AlloyASG: Alloy Predicate Code Representation as a Compact Structurally Balanced Graph” accepted into MODELS 2024.
• June 2024: One paper “Does Every Computer Scientist Need to Know Formal Methods?” published in Formal Aspects of Computing.
• April 2024: Invited speaker at the 2024 NSF CISE CAREER Workshop. Slides are up on the agenda for all of our CAREER Awardee Talks.
• Feburary 2024: Gave a presentation on CS vs SE vs CE majors and how to prepare before college at Digital Divas 2024.
• Janurary 2024: One paper “LLM4TDD: Best Practices for Test Driven Development Using Large Language Models” accepted into LLMCODE@ICSE 2024.
• More: (Older News).

Hobbies

I love puzzles just as much as my cat likes laying out over all the puzzle pieces. In my downtime, I play video games: I have a weekly discord get together with all my close friends in Texas. I equally enjoy getting out of the house. Since I stopped running marathons, I’ve taken to hiking – I have a goal to visit every national park in the United States. I am also eager to get out and explore the world – I enjoy backpacking with my husband internationally.