Malcom Gethers Wins Distinguished Dissertation Award
Professor Malcom Gethers received the 2012-13 Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Natural and Computational Sciences for his dissertation, Information Integration for Software Maintenance and Evolution, under the direction of Professor Denys Poshyvanyk. Each May as part of the commencement ceremonies, the award is given to a single Ph.D. student in the College of Arts & Sciences at the College of William & Mary for their exemplary achievement in graduate student research as demonstrated by the content of their dissertation.
Malcom has been an author on close to two dozen research papers, one of which received a Distinguished Paper Award at ICSM'10. While at William & Mary, Malcom was the recipient of a Southern Regional Education Board Doctoral Scholarship (2011), as well as of two Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSCG) Fellowships (2009 & 2010). His research interests include software engineering, software maintenance and evolution, mining of software repositories, feature location, software measurement, and traceability link recovery and management. Upon his graduation in August 2012, Malcom assumed a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Information Systems Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
The College's Distinguished Thesis & Dissertation Awards were established by the Arts & Sciences Graduate Studies Advisory Board to recognize exemplary achievement in graduate student research. To receive a Distinguished Dissertation Award, a doctoral student's dissertation must be based on original research and contribute significantly to the discipline. Individuals must be nominated by their dissertation advisor in their respective department/program. A panel of scholars then judges the merit of the work. Each May, one award is given in the Natural and Computational Sciences (Applied Science, Computer Science, and Physics). The award carries a prize of $500.
Malcom is the fifth Computer Science doctoral student (Wu, 2011-12; Gianvecchio, 2009-10; Chernikov, 2007-08; McCombs 2006-07) to receive the A&S Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Natural and Computational Sciences since its establishment in 2004-2005.
Photo by Saskia Mordijck