New Lecturer joins Kent from Microsoft

Maria Christakis portrait

Dr Maria Christakis has joined the University of Kent as a lecturer in the School of Computing. Maria is a member of the Programming Languages and Systems Research Group and will be based at the Canterbury campus.

Maria has a PhD from ETH Zurich with a thesis on ‘Narrowing the Gap between Verification and Systematic Testing’. She has more recently worked as a Post-doctoral researcher for Microsoft Research in Washington, USA.

‘My goal is to develop theoretical foundations and practical tools for building more reliable and usable software and increasing developer productivity. I am mostly interested in software engineering, programming languages, and formal methods. I particularly like investigating topics in automatic test generation, software verification, program analysis, and empirical software engineering. My tools and techniques explore novel ways in writing, specifying, verifying, testing, and debugging programs in order to make them more robust while at the same time improving the user experience.’