First Victor Basili Fellows named

The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce the first two recipients of the Victor Basili Fellowship: Thomas Gilray of the University of Utah, and Niki Vazou of the University of California, San Diego.

Thomas Gilray’s work involves static analysis of higher-order languages (also called control-flow analysis). His interests also include semantics, language design, compilers and implementations, safety and verification, parallelism and high-performance solvers (e.g., constraint solving on the GPU). He has recently authored a paper with Professor David Van Horn.

Niki Vazou’s work and research interests include static program verification and type systems. She works on LiquidHaskell, a static verifier for Haskell based on Liquid Types.

“We are extremely proud to host, and welcome the inaugural Basili Fellows to UMD’s Computer Science Department," said Professor Samir Khuller, Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science. “Victor Basili is an absolute stalwart of the field of empirical software engineering and we are delighted to launch this prestigious program to bring in two excellent young scholars.”  When asked about his wish for the new fellows, Khuller said, “I hope they will work productively with both faculty and graduate students in the area of programming languages and software engineering.”

The Basili Fellowship allows new researchers to begin their careers at UMD, perform cutting edge research in applied software engineering and programming languages, and expand our existing CS research community.  Professor Victor Basili has generously supplied initial funding of one million dollars from research funds.

The primary goal of this effort is to promote research collaborations that will solve a variety of problems in government and industry by using cutting-edge software engineering and programming languages research. Extending the scope of the software engineering program from its established roots in software process and measurement, the new initiative will allow researchers to emphasize important areas of research ranging from web development, cloud computing and privacy and security concerns. This fellowship’s purpose is to attract young scholars, and accord them the freedom to evolve their research in a collaborative and supportive environment.