Gail Murphy

Gail Murphy is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Vice-President Research & Innovation at the University of British Columbia (UBC). A co-founder of Tasktop Technologies Incorporated, she leads the Software Practices Lab and is affiliated with CAIDA (Centre for Artificial Intelligence Decision-making and Action) and ICICS (UBC Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems).

• B.Sc. (Honours), University of Alberta (1987)
• M.Sc., University of Washington (1994)
• Ph.D., University of Washington (1996)

Her research focuses on software engineering, particularly improving knowledge worker productivity and tools for evolving large-scale systems. She combines lightweight design approaches with industrial evaluations, addressing structural degradation in software systems through:

• Techniques for understanding/imposing structure in existing systems
• Design approaches for component reuse and flexible architectures

Her recent work includes developer discussion analysis for design recovery (2022), semantic-based task relevance detection (2022), and automated resource-task association (2023). Awards include SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2023), ACM Fellow (2023), and Royal Society of Canada Fellow (2023). She has taught courses like Introduction to Software Engineering (CPSC 310) and Software Construction (CPSC 210).