[24/08/2023] Dr Elizabeth Polgreen a Lecturer in Programming Languages for Trustworthy Systems at the School of Informatics is among ten awardees of the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowships programme it was announced on 24th August. “Engineering touches many aspects of our daily lives and is central to tackling the challenges that we face in the UK and around the world, in healthcare, security, transport, infrastructure, energy and environmental change. I am delighted to see the range of backgrounds and experiences represented from within this cohort of Research Fellowships. This breadth and diversity of new thought, scholarship and training will help deliver innovative solutions to meet the needs of our global communities. I am excited to see how these amazing researchers, at the start of their careers, will help to change the world”. Professor Jonathan Cooper FREng FRSEChair of the Academy’s Research Fellowships Steering Group Image Elizabeth’s fellowship Automated and provably correct code modernisation will address issues with legacy code, which is expensive to maintain and often full of bugs, yet ubiquitous in industry because updating it is a tedious manual task. Elizabeth looks into automating that task. Her research focuses on program synthesis, i.e., algorithms that can automatically generate code that is guaranteed to be correct. In this fellowship, she will focus on developing program synthesis techniques that combine the strengths of machine learning and formal methods, and deploying these techniques to automatically modernize industrial legacy code. The Research Fellowships programme supports outstanding early-career researchers to become future research leaders in engineering. The fellowships are designed to advance excellence in engineering by providing funding for five years to allow awardees the freedom to concentrate on basic research in any field of engineering. Up to £625,000 can be awarded over five years. In addition to direct financial support, the scheme provides an opportunity to establish a research track record and, in turn, to be in a stronger position to apply for additional funding and grow a research team. Awardees also benefit from mentoring support from an Academy Fellow on research and career development as well as reduced teaching and administrative duties to allow time for research, training opportunities and networking with other Research Fellows and Academy Fellows. Related links Royal Academy of Engineering Announcement on RAEng website Elizabeth Polgreen’s website This article was published on 2024-03-18
