Preetha Chatterjee

Dr. Preetha Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Drexel University's College of Engineering, where she leads the SOftware Engineering and Analytics Research (SOAR) Lab. Her academic career spans software engineering research, teaching, and service, with a focus on improving developer productivity through advanced analytics and tools.

Dr. Chatterjee earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Delaware, advised by Dr. Lori Pollock, following 5+ years of industry experience as a Software Engineer. Her educational background bridges practical industry experience with rigorous academic training.

Her research focuses on Software Engineering with emphasis on developing tools, knowledge sources, and strategies to support software maintenance and improve developer productivity. She incorporates evidence from mining software repositories, conducting empirical studies, and adapting state-of-the-art techniques from Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Her current research directions include LLM-assisted software development and maintenance, developer collaboration in distributed software teams, and knowledge extraction from large-scale software artifacts. She has made significant contributions to emotion mining in developer communications, toxicity detection in open source projects, and trust dynamics in GitHub pull requests.

Dr. Chatterjee's publications demonstrate a clear progression from foundational work on mining developer chat communications and code snippets toward more sophisticated applications of machine learning and large language models in software engineering contexts. Her recent work increasingly focuses on the intersection of software engineering with social aspects like emotions, trust, and toxicity in developer interactions.

• Distinguished Reviewer Award at FSE 2023
• Drexel CCI Research Excellence Award (awarded to her lab member Ramtin Ehsani)
• Drexel CS Leadership Award (awarded to her lab member Amirali Sajadi)

Dr. Chatterjee has advised numerous students at various levels, including Ph.D., M.S., and undergraduate researchers. Her SOAR Lab currently includes Ph.D. students Ramtin Ehsani and Amirali Sajadi, who have received significant recognition for their work. She has served on multiple program committees for major software engineering conferences including ICSE, FSE, ASE, and MSR, and has held leadership roles such as Tutorials Co-chair for MSR 2025 and Journal-first Co-Chair for ICPC 2024. She co-leads the Drexel Programming Systems Seminar and has been an editorial board member for the Journal of Systems and Software.

The SOAR Lab focuses on innovative research at the intersection of software engineering, machine learning, and natural language processing. The lab has produced influential datasets like DISCO (Discord Chat Conversations for Software Engineering Research) and comprehensive annotated datasets of GitHub issue threads. Current projects include improving LLM-assisted bug resolution, security assessment of LLM-generated code, emotion mining from software engineering communication, and information extraction from developer chat conversations.