Ajitha Rajan

Ajitha Rajan is a Professor (Personal Chair of Software Testing and Verification) at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Previously, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Oxford University's Computer Science Department and Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (LIG) in France. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in August 2009 under the supervision of Prof. Mats Heimdahl.

Her research spans two main directions: Automated Software Testing Techniques covering test input generation, test oracles, and coverage metrics; and Biomedical Artificial Intelligence focusing on cancer survival models, interpretability for biological sequences, and medical images. Her work bridges software engineering and biomedical applications, particularly in the development of trustworthy AI systems for healthcare.

Professor Rajan leads several significant research projects including a Royal Society Industry Fellowship (2022-2025) on AutoTest for autonomous vehicle perception safety, the H2020 European Project KATY (2021-2025) on AI for genomics and personalized medicine where she serves as Edinburgh Lead PI, and an EPSRC Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Node project (2020-2024). Her recent publications demonstrate strong activity across software testing, explainable AI, and biomedical applications, with numerous papers accepted to top conferences in 2025 including ML for Healthcare, IJCAI, and ESEM.

Among her scientific recognitions, she received the Best Reviewer Award at ISSTA'25. Her work has been consistently published in leading venues including ICSE, ICASSP, and Communications Biology.

Professor Rajan actively mentors PhD students working on diverse topics from automated testing of speech recognition systems to explainable AI for medical image analysis and cancer immunotherapy. She teaches undergraduate courses in Software Testing, Computer Programming, and Embedded Systems, and has been instrumental in establishing several fully funded PhD positions through Centres for Doctoral Training at the University of Edinburgh.