Vasilescu Recognized for Early Career Achievement

Bogdan Vasilescu, Assistant Professor in the Institute for Software Research, is a recipient of this year’s MSR Ric Holt Early Career Achievement Award.

Granted by the International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, the award recognizes outstanding junior researchers who have provided significant contributions in the area of mining software repositories -- with particular emphasis given to the outputs produced by candidates during the early stages of their career.

The International Conference on Mining Software Repositories brings together researchers from across the globe working on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) -- a field concerned with analyzing the rich data available in software repositories to uncover interesting and actionable information about software systems and projects.

Vasilescu and his students’ work  engages in mixed-methods interdisciplinary empirical research at the intersection of software engineering, social computing, and computer-supported cooperative work. This work was noted by the awards committee to have had a significant impact on the field overall. “In particular, his work on social science has made an influential impact in the MSR community,” the committee noted. “He has made skillful use of mixed methods research in the area of MSR and especially DevOps and developer socio-technical behavior.”

Vasilescu’s contributions to the field expand beyond just the scope of research outcomes, however, as the committee explains. “We also value him training a growing number of new PhD students who are becoming new, strong contributors to the [Software Engineering] community.”

Vasilescu received his PhD in Computer Science from Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, in October 2014, before completing a post-doctorate in the Davis Eclectic Computational Analytics Lab (DECAL) at UC Davis. In addition to his PhD work earning him the Best Dissertation Award from the Institute for Programming Research and Algorithmics, he has also delivered talks to large audiences at open source practitioner events and discussed his research as a guest on the Sustain Podcast.