Professor Marsha Chechik has started a two-year term as Chair of the Department of Computer Science (DCS), effective July 1, 2020.

Chechik is the first female Chair in the Department’s history. She had served as Interim Chair for the 2019–2020 academic year.

“Over the last year, under Professor Chechik’s leadership, DCS has extended its excellence in teaching, research, and outreach,” remarked Melanie Woodin, dean of U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science, in an email to the Department. “I’m so pleased to have the opportunity to continue growing [our] partnership during her continued tenure.”

Chechik is a world-renowned expert in the application of formal methods to improve the quality of software, whose work has had both a deep theoretical impact on the field, as well as positively influencing industrial practice. She was recently recognized as a Distinguished Member of the ACM (the world’s largest professional computing society), an honour bestowed on those “who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field.”

Chechik has authored over 200 papers in formal methods, software specification and verification, computer safety and security, and requirements engineering, and has taken leadership roles in her community, as Associate Editor of several of the top journals in software engineering, and Program Co-Chair of numerous high-impact conferences.

She also has played a strong leadership role in DCS over the last decade, serving as Vice Chair from 2009–2011 and 2013–2016, and chairing the Computational Education Working Group in 2018, which has informed DCS planning for the growth of our department and broadening of our outreach and partnership activities.

Chechik is well-poised to lead a strategic visioning exercise that will lay the foundations for achieving the potential of DCS to foster excellence in research, enhance the learning environment for our students, and establish an expansive series of industrial and international partnerships, in the context of pervasive computing in a rapidly-changing world.

“I’m proud to be calling DCS my academic home for almost 25 years,” said Professor Chechik. “And I’m humbled and excited to have the opportunity to lead DCS as it embarks on its visioning exercise.”