Alessandra Gorla

Alessandra Gorla is an Associate Research Professor at the IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid, Spain. She holds a Ph.D. in Informatics from the Università della Svizzera Italiana (University of Lugano) in Switzerland, where her doctoral thesis on automatic workarounds for software failures earned the Fritz Kutter Award (2011). Prior to IMDEA, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Saarland University’s Software Engineering Chair in Germany and a visiting researcher at Google.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Informatics, Università della Svizzera Italiana (2011)

Research Interests: Her work focuses on software engineering, with emphasis on mobile and web security, software testing/analysis, and automatic software repair. She has pioneered techniques like intrinsic redundancy for self-healing systems and malware detection in mobile applications.

Awards:

• Fritz Kutter Award (2011)
• Best Student Poster Award (2008)
• Best Paper Award (2014)

Service: She has served as SBST program co-chair (2018), tool demo co-chair at FSE 2016, and artifact evaluation co-chair at ISSTA and ESSoS 2016. Her work spans organizing committees for major software engineering conferences.

Teaching: She has taught courses on mobile testing, self-healing systems, and software engineering at Saarland University and the University of Lugano.

Her lab focuses on advancing software reliability through automated techniques, with ongoing projects analyzing app behaviors, third-party libraries in iOS, and lazy initialization optimizations.