Laurie Williams

Foremost co-researcher in agile software development and in the security of healthcare IT applications, Williams has served as a Professor in the Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU), co-Director of the NCSU Science of Security Lablet, Senior Research Director of the Institute of Next Generation Systems (ITnG), and the software engineering area representative for the Secure Open Systems Initiative. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah, her MBA from Duke University Fuqua School of Business, and her BS in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University. She worked for IBM Corporation in various technical and managerial capacities for nine years in Raleigh, NC and Research Triangle Park, NC before returning to academia.

Her research has focused on software security particularly in relation to healthcare IT; agile software development practices and processes; software reliability, software testing and analysis; open source software development; and broadening participation and increasing retention in computer science. She is one of the foremost researchers in the security of healthcare IT applications. Williams was also one of the founders of the first XP/Agile conference, XP Universe, in 2001 in Raleigh, which has since grown into the Agile 200x annual conference.

She is also the lead author of the book, "Pair Programming Illuminated" and a co-editor of "Extreme Programming Perspectives," both published by Addison-Wesley. In January 2009, her 2000 IEEE Software paper "Stengthening the Case for Pair Programming" was chosen as an IEEE Software 25th Anniversary Top Pick Paper and appeared on the list of the Most Cited IEEE Software Articles for a 25-year period. Williams has also served as the instructor of a highly-rated professional agile software development course that was widely taught in Fortune 500 companies. She has also trained industry in other software engineering topics such as software security and has been a certified instructor of John Musa's software reliability engineering course, More Reliable Software Faster and Cheaper.

With her students in the Realsearch group, she has been involved in working collaboratively with high-tech industries like ABB Corporation, Cisco, IBM Corporation, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Red Hat, Sabre Airline Solutions, SAS, Tekelec, and healthcare IT organizations, as well as on open source software. The research collaborations have resulted in significant publications in the primary conferences in her research area, maintaining a balance between research and practice in software engineering. She has authored more than 170 refereed publications.

Williams is an NSF CAREER award winner. She is among a select group of faculty at NCSU to have won the Outstanding Teaching award for innovative teaching from the University Chancellor, and is an inductee in NC State's Academy of Outstanding Teachers. She was also chosen as "Most Helpful Professor Outside of Class" by computer science students in 2006, and in 2009 was honored to receive the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award. She is a multiple IBM University Partnership award winner, an IBM Eclipse Innovation Award winner, a Jazz Innovation Award winner, and an IBM Smarter Planet Healthcare Industry Skills award winner.

Williams has served on the program committee of numerous conferences in her primary areas of research. She served as general chair of the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEET) 2008 and the Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) conference in 2009. She also served as Program Chair of the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE) in 2008 and of the education track at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in 2006, and again in 2013. She has served on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the Springer Empirical Software Engineering journals, and has been a guest editor of a special issue of IEEE Software on Extreme Programming, of IEEE Computer on agile software development, and Computer Science Education on agile software development.