Gail's Biography
Gail Murphy is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and an Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia. She is also a co-founder and Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies. She graduated with M.Sc. and Ph.D. Degrees from the University of Washington and a B.Sc. from the University of Alberta. She was recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has been the recipient of a number of awards for her work in software evolution including the Dahl-Nygaard junior prize from AITO, a NSERC Steacie fellowship, a CRA-W Anita Borg Early Career award and a University of Washington College of Engineering Early Career Diamond away. Her research interests are in software development and knowledge worker productivity.
UBC is one of the leading academic institutions in the country with a history of research and teaching excellence. Tasktop Technologies leads the world in providing software solutions to connect the world of software delivery.
I love collaborating with undergraduate and graduate students and seeing the excitement of discovery when we are successful with new research directions. I love having a small part of helping other researchers be successful in achieving research results. I love seeing the products Tasktop builds have a profound effect on the industry.
At UBC, Mik Kersten (Ph.D. UBC 2007) and a team of students developed an open source project called Mylyn that was integrated into the default version of the Eclipse platform. Mylyn is downloaded millions of times per month and is heavily used. It was amazing to see this project quickly have an impact on the practice of software development.
We have built software tools that have helped ease the friction with which software is developed by removing repetitive work.
I would like to see every software development team have a diverse composition. As a member of the CRA-W board, I am co-organizing a Virtual Townhall series where we have women researchers share their area of research passion and achievements and also provide mentoring advice. As a virtual series, we hope to reach a very diverse and large number of women and attract them to Computer Science and Engineering.
I want to make software development accessible to a wide range of individuals and I want to make Canada the place to be to pursue research in a multitude of fields.
