Maria Christakis Receives 2026 ACM-W Rising Star Award
ACM-W Rising Star Award is a recognition granted by ACM-W (ACM Women in Computing), a committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, to early-career women who have demonstrated outstanding research contributions in computing. The award highlights emerging leaders in computer science and related fields and is based on criteria such as research excellence, innovation, and impact. It aims to increase the visibility of talented women in computing and to support their professional development in academia and industry.
Maria Christakis has been recognized with the 2026 ACM-W Rising Star Award. A Full Professor of Software Engineering at TU Wien, she leads the the Software Engineering Research Unit. Her work combines theoretical foundations with practical tools to advance the reliability, robustness, and usability of software, with a strong focus on formal methods, program analysis, automatic test generation, and software verification.
She received her PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, following earlier studies at the National Technical University of Athens, and has held research and academic positions at Microsoft Research, the University of Kent, and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.
Maria Christakis is the recipient of multiple prestigious awards, including a Google Research Scholar Award, an Amazon Research Award, and an ERC grant, and she is a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her work aims to improve software reliability while enhancing developer productivity through innovative techniques for specifying, testing, and verifying programs.
