Doctoral Research in CSE: What's the Goal and How to Get There

Matthew Dwyer

Event Details
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Talk:
4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m., 115 Avery Hall

Reception:
3:30 p.m., 348 Avery Hall

Matthew Dwyer, Ph.D.

Department Chair, Leonard A. Lovell Professor, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Abstract

Doctoral training has two purposes: to educate students in the state-of-the-art in specific areas of knowledge and to train them to be independent researchers who can advance the state-of-the-art. It is common for doctoral students, and their advisors, to focus mostly on the former, but there are skills, habits, and practices that students should explore and reflect on if they are to maximize their potential as an independent researcher.

This talk will describe issues that Doctoral students will confront in establishing their own personal research agenda. The perspective in this talk is that students “own” their research agenda and that graduate school is a unique opportunity for them to practice developing and enacting that agenda under the mentorship of their graduate advisor.

Speaker Bio

Matthew B. Dwyer is the Lovell Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  From 1985 through 1990, he developed compilers for embedded systems and obtained his Ph.D. in 1995 from UMass-Amherst.  He has published more than 100 refereed papers in the areas of program analysis, software specification, and automated formal methods. He has supervised nine Doctoral students, four of whom hold academic positions. He has chaired the top research conferences (ICSE, FSE, OOPSLA) and serves as editor-in-chief of the top journal (TSE) in the field of software engineering. He was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2007 and an IEEE Fellow in 2013.