Rate My Professor Emilia Mendes

Emilia Mendes is Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Aarhus University, a position she assumed in February 2024. Born and raised in Brazil, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Computing from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 1984 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton in 1999. She began her Master’s in Computer Science at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1990. Prior to Aarhus, Mendes served as Full Professor in the Computer Science Department at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden from September 2012 to mid-January 2024, Associate Professor at the University of Auckland for eleven years, lecturer for one year at Zayed University in Dubai, and part-time Distinguished Professor at the University of Oulu in Finland from 2015 to 2018. Earlier, she worked as a programmer in private companies until 1990 and as a teacher and R&D manager until 1995.

Her research centers on Empirical Software Engineering, particularly Human-centric Software Engineering exploring how personality traits and capabilities influence agile team climate, productivity, and product quality; Evidence-based Software Engineering involving systematic literature reviews and mapping studies; Value-based Software Engineering for decision-making; and statistical/machine learning applications to software effort estimation, team climate forecasting, dementia prognosis, and maintainability prediction. She leads Aarhus University’s Software Engineering research group and holds a Danish National Research Foundation Chair from June 2024 to May 2027 focused on advancing Software Effort Estimation using AI and natural language processing. Mendes boasts over 10,000 citations with an h-index of 58, ranks #32 among Empirical Software Engineering scholars worldwide and #20 among top Computer Science scientists in Sweden (2023), and is among the global top 2% scientists. She has secured 11,921,603 EUR in research grants, received nine best paper awards at international conferences, edited books including Web Engineering (2006), co-edited ESEM ’12 proceedings, and authored recent papers such as “Exploring the relation between personality traits and agile team climate” (2024). She served as General Chair of EASE 2017, Program Committee Co-Chair for EASE and ESEM 2012, and holds editorial board positions at Information and Software Technology and ACM Computing Surveys.