Assistant Professor, Full CV (Updated as of September 2024)
Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I am recruiting Ph.D. Students!
I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in January of 2025 as a co-director of the LASER Lab. I am currently recruiting Ph.D. students. If you are interested in researching problems at the intersections of
software engineering, human factors, and program comprehension, email me at mendres@umass.edu!
In January 2025, I will start as an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I will co-direct the LASER Lab. My research interests lie at the intersection of Software Engineering and human factors, where I explore techniques and interventions supporting programmer productivity and wellbeing.
Overall, my work uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to enable developers to become experts faster and be more supported and productive. Along with core software engineering techniques, my work leverages interdisciplinary approaches from psychology and medicine to address human-factored software engineering problems. Current and recent projects include building and assessing tools based on type theory and program synthesis to support developers to write correct code more quickly, using medical imaging techniques to learn more about the cognitive basis of programming, and studying the impact of external influences, such as psychoactive substances, on software developers.
I also maintain the CS Grad Job Guide, which presents advice from several CS researchers on how to navigate the post-Ph.D. job market.
When I am not doing research or mentoring students, I enjoy cooking, biking, and playing with my cat, Cleo. I also play cello, and I'm always up for improvising and swapping music recommendations!
I am interested in improving programmer productivity through evidence-based educational interventions. I focus on training skills like technical reading and information search that generalize to multiple parts of software development. I thus use a variety of techniques, including both qualitative and quantitative analysis, psychological assessments, and medical imaging to better understand the cognitive factors behind such skills with the ultimate goal of helping novices become experts faster.
Ongoing Projects: Using VR to teach spatial reasoning for novice programmers, and investigating cognitive causality in programming more directly using TMS
My research improves programmer productivity via the development and user-focused evaluation of programming tools for finding and fixing software defects. Leveraging techniques from program synthesis, machine learning, and automated program repair, I design efficient programming support that can help both novice and expert programmers alike write more correct code faster.
I improve programmer productivity and wellbeing through a data-driven understanding of the impact that external factors (such as gender-related bias or psychoactive substance use) have on software engineering. I believe that understanding the mechanisms and magnitudes of such environmental barriers is a necessary precursor to systematic policy reform. By gaining an evidence-based understanding of the impacts of these external factors, I hope to help developers produce higher-quality code and also feel happier while doing so.
Ongoing Projects: A controlled study on the impact of cannabis on programming ability.