Computer Science and Engineering graduate Kathryn Stolee has received has received a Faculty Early Career Development award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award, known as the NSF CAREER Award, is one of the highest honors given by NSF to young faculty members in science and engineering.
NSF will provide $500,000 in funding over five years in support of her project, “On the Foundations of Semantic Code Search.” Her research uses semantic code search to help developers find code for reuse or for repairing broken code.
Stolee is currently an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. Her research interests are in software engineering, program analysis, code search, empirical studies and program repair.
Stolee is also three-time CSE graduate, receiving her B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from Nebraska. She is also a graduate of the ESQuaReD Lab, where she studied under the supervision of Sebastian Elbaum. She said she attributes a large part of her current success to the faculty and relationships she built while studying here.
“The software engineering group at Nebraska is very cohesive,” Stolee said. “They treat their Ph.D. students like colleagues. What that creates is an environment of mutual respect and high-quality output. That’s what attracted me, and that’s why I stayed.”
Interestingly enough, Stolee was what she calls a “computing late-bloomer” and originally enrolled at Nebraska as a business major.
“I knew nothing about computer science when I got started,” Stolee said. “It wasn’t until I took my first software engineering class that I really liked computer science. My students find that interesting.”
Stolee will be back at Nebraska this September as one of the featured speakers at CSE’s upcoming 50th anniversary celebration.
Learn more about Stolee’s NSF CAREER Award and her research here: https://go.unl.edu/rqfj