Allison Sullivan

Allison Sullivan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), where she also serves as the Undergraduate Software Engineering Program Director. She is a member of the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) at UTA and serves as faculty advisor for UTA's Society of Women Engineers (SWE) club. Dr. Sullivan received her PhD in Software Verification, Validation and Testing (SVVAT) from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017 under Sarfraz Khurshid.

Her educational background includes:

• PhD in Software Verification, Validation and Testing, University of Texas at Austin (2017)
• M.S. in Software Engineering, University of Texas at Austin (2014)
• B.S. in Software Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas (2012)

Dr. Sullivan's research focuses on two primary areas:

• Automated Software Engineering: Test/Oracle Generation, Automated Bug Localization and Repair, Mutation Testing, and Regression Testing
• Formal Methods and Programming Languages: Abstractions, Finite Model Finders, Program Synthesis, and SAT/SMT Solvers

She leads the SCOPE lab which focuses on 'showing the correctness of all program executions' and has published extensively on Alloy modeling language applications.

Her recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on applying formal methods to software engineering problems, with a growing emphasis on the intersection of large language models and software development practices. Her work spans theoretical foundations, tool development, and empirical studies of how developers use modeling languages.

Her scientific achievements have been recognized with:

• NSF CAREER Award (2024)
• UTA CSE department Rising Star Research Award (2024)
• UTA College of Engineering Outstanding Early Career Faculty Award (2025)
• NSF grant for building an educational tool for software modeling ($400k)

Dr. Sullivan has successfully advised two PhD students to completion: Dr. Ana Jovanovic (defended November 2024) and Dr. Anahita Samadi (defended February 2025). She actively mentors undergraduate researchers and has secured significant research funding including the NSF CAREER grant. Her service includes committee roles for major conferences including ASE, ISSRE, and FormaliSE.

She leads the SCOPE lab at UTA, which brings together graduate and undergraduate researchers to develop techniques for improving software verification and validation, with particular emphasis on making formal methods more accessible to practitioners.