A message from John Hepburn, Vice-President, Research and International, and Helen Burt, Associate Vice-President, Research and International
Further to the recent announcement of Dr. Helen Burt’s appointment as Vice-President, Research and International, pro tem, effective June 1, 2016, we are pleased to announce that Dr. Gail Murphy will at the same time assume the role of Associate Vice-President, Research and International, pro tem.
Dr. Murphy is a highly respected professor in UBC’s Department of Computer Science and Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Science. After completing her B.Sc. at the University of Alberta in 1987, she worked for five years as a software engineer in the Lower Mainland. She later pursued graduate studies in computer science at the University of Washington, earning first an M.Sc. (1994) and then a Ph.D (1996).
Dr. Murphy joined UBC in 1996. She was a key driver of the new Master of Data Science—a professional graduate program launching this fall—and has been instrumental in championing the creation of a Data Science Institute at the university. She also maintains an active research group with post-doctoral and graduate students.
Dr. Murphy’s research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage and coordinate the information that matters most for their work. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Scientist, as well as co-founder and Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies Incorporated.
Dr. Murphy also serves on the editorial boards for Communications of the ACM, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Software Engineering. She is also the general chair for the ACM Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Education: Software for Humanity (SPLASH), which will take place in Vancouver in 2017.
Please join us in wishing Gail the very best as she transitions to this exciting new chapter of her career at UBC. We are confident she possesses all the attributes and experience necessary for this important position and we have every confidence she will contribute immensely to UBC’s research mission.