Rate My Professor Myra Cohen

Myra Cohen is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University, holding the Lanh & Oanh Nguyen Endowed Chair of Software Engineering and serving as Associate Chair for Research. Her career includes prior roles as the Susan J. Rosowski Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she was part of the Laboratory for Empirically-based Software Quality Research and Development (ESQuaReD), and as a Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the University of Vermont. Cohen obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Auckland in 2004, her M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Vermont in 1999, and her B.S. from Cornell University's School of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Cohen's research specializes in software testing for highly-configurable, embedded, cyber-physical, and scientific software systems, including search-based software engineering and synergies with synthetic biology and bioinformatics. Her projects encompass dependable, explainable AI-driven computational biology; quantum computing simulations; blockchain fault tolerance foundations; and just-in-time verification for high-performance compilers. She has earned prestigious awards such as the NSF CAREER award, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, four ACM distinguished paper awards, the 2025 IEEE Technical Council on Software Engineering Barbora Bühnová Leadership Award, and recognition as an ACM Distinguished Scientist, ASE Fellow, Better Scientific Software Fellow, and IEEE Senior Member. Cohen's influence is evident in her leadership in the field, including steering committees for IEEE/ACM ESEC/FSE, ICST, and SPLC; program co-chairships for ESEC/FSE 2020 and ISSTA 2025; and general chair for ASE 2015. Key publications include "Covering arrays for efficient fault characterization in complex configuration spaces" (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2006), "Constructing interaction test suites for highly-configurable systems in the presence of constraints: a greedy approach" (IEEE TSE, 2008), "Practical Combinatorial Interaction Testing: Empirical Findings on Efficiency and Early Fault Detection" (IEEE TSE, 2015), and "An empirical investigation of organic software product lines" (Empirical Software Engineering, 2021).