Ajitha Rajan

Ajitha Rajan is a Professor (Personal Chair of Software Testing & Verification) at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. She joined the university in December 2012 as a Reader (equivalent to Associate Professor in American terms) and was promoted to Professor in 2024. Prior to her position at Edinburgh, she held postdoctoral positions at Oxford University and Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble in France. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in August 2009 under Professor Mats Heimdahl.

Her research focuses on two primary directions: Automated Software Testing (including test input generation, test oracles, and coverage measurement) and Biomedical AI (particularly cancer survival models and interpretability for biological sequences and medical images). Her work has applications in safety-critical systems, blockchains, embedded systems, and medical diagnostics. She has made significant contributions to explainable AI for healthcare applications, especially in lung cancer detection and cancer survival analysis.

Her recent publications demonstrate a strong trend toward interdisciplinary research at the intersection of software engineering and biomedical applications. She has numerous publications in top venues including ICSE, ASE, and healthcare-focused conferences. Her work increasingly focuses on making AI systems more interpretable and trustworthy, particularly in medical contexts where model decisions can have life-or-death consequences.

• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Reviewer Award, ISSTA 2025
• Best Paper Award at ICHI 2025
• Promoted to Professor (Chair in Software Testing & Verification) 2024
• SICSA Best Supervisor Award 2024
• ACM Distinguished Paper Award 2008

Professor Rajan actively supervises PhD students in both software testing and biomedical AI domains. She leads several funded projects including MANIFEST (a cancer immunotherapy response research platform), a Huawei Joint Lab project on RobustCheck, a Royal Society Industry Fellowship on AutoTest, and the KATY project on clinical knowledge for personalized medicine. Her research group includes current PhD students working on explainable AI for medical image analysis, scenario-based testing for autonomous driving, and protein design applications.