Marsha Chechik

Marsha Chechik is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Arts and Science. She previously served as Chair of the Department from 2019-2022 and as Acting Dean in the Faculty of Information from July to December 2022. Her academic career spans over two decades with significant contributions to software engineering and formal methods.

Professor Chechik's research focuses on the application of formal methods to enhance software quality. Her work encompasses several key areas including scalable automated verification techniques (model-checking and theorem-proving), formal specification languages, verification of protocols, non-classical logics, and reasoning under inconsistency. She has made substantial contributions to Model Management, particularly in supporting the development and analysis of heterogeneous related models and transformations between them, as well as in Product Line engineering for high-quality model development. Her research demonstrates a progression from foundational work in multi-valued model checking to more applied research in product lines and uncertainty management.

Her publication record shows consistent productivity with over 100 publications spanning from the late 1990s to 2017. Recent work (2015-2017) demonstrates increasing focus on variability-based model transformations, product line engineering, and practical applications of formal methods in safety-critical systems, particularly in automotive software as evidenced by her SAFECOMP 2017 publication.

Among her notable achievements:

• Best paper award at the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'12) for 'Managing Requirements Uncertainty with Partial Models'
• SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'12) for 'Partial Models: Towards Modeling and Reasoning with Uncertainty'

Professor Chechik has supervised numerous graduate students to completion, including Michalis Famelis (PhD 2016), Aws Albarghouthi (PhD 2015), and Sahar Kokaly. Her research has been supported by various Canadian funding agencies. She has organized and contributed to several workshops including the Workshop on Modelling in Software Engineering (MiSE).

Her work has practical applications in safety-critical systems, particularly in automotive software systems. She appears to lead a research group focused on formal methods and software engineering at the University of Toronto, with numerous collaborations both within and outside the institution. She has also contributed to tools development, including the Yasm software model-checker and the TReMer tool for relationship-driven model merging.