CAREER awards are the most prestigious NSF awards that support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the mission of their organizations.

This award, valued at $495,721, supports his proposal titled “Expanding Developers’ Usage of Software Tools by Enabling Social Learning”.  The project aims to increase the frequency and effectiveness of social tool learning – the sharing of tools such as memory debuggers and performance analyzers between software developers – so developers are more aware of these helpful programs and applications. 

The award is effective August 1, 2013 through July 31, 2018.

Research Abstract: Tools can help software developers alleviate the challenge of creating and maintaining software. Unfortunately, developers only use a small subset of the available tools. The proposed research investigates how social learning, an effective mechanism for discovering new tools, can help software developers to discover relevant tools. In doing so, developers will be able to increase software quality while decreasing development time.

Murphy-Hill received his PhD from Portland State University in 2009 and his BS from The Evergreen State College in 2001.  His research interests are in the areas of graphics and human computer interaction and software engineering and programming languages.  For more information on Dr. Murphy-Hill, click here.

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