Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher
RAND Corporation

Shari Lawrence Pfleeger is a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation, a not-for-profit company doing high-quality, high-impact research in the public interest. At RAND, she works on policy and decision-making issues that help organizations and government agencies understand whether and how information technology supports their mission and goals.

Since 1982, Dr. Pfleeger has been president of Systems/Software, Inc., a consultancy specializing in software engineering and technology. From 1997 to 2000, she was also a visiting professor at the University of Maryland's computer science department. In the past, she was founder and director of Howard University's Center for Research in Evaluating Software Technology (CREST), and was a visiting scientist at the City University (London) Centre for Software Reliability, principal scientist at MITRE Corporation's Software Engineering Center, and manager of the measurement program at the Contel Technology Center. She began her career as a developer and maintainer for real-time, business-critical software systems. Thus, she has experience both with the practical problems of software development and the theoretical underpinnings of software engineering and computer science. Pfleeger is well-known for her work in empirical studies of software engineering and for her multi-disciplinary approach to solving information technology problems.

For several years, Dr. Pfleeger was associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Software, where she edited the Quality Time column, and then associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. From 1998 to 2002, she was a member of the editorial board of Prentice Hall's Software Quality Institute series. A member of IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Association for Computing Machinery, Pfleeger was elected to the executive committee of the Technical Council on Software Engineering from 1996 to 2000. Frequently invited to give keynote presentations and tutorials at conferences, Pfleeger was the general chair of the Second International Symposium on Software Metrics (in London, England) and the program co-chair of the Fourth International Symposium on Software Metrics (in Albuquerque, New Mexico). She and Dr. Jarrett Rosenberg (Sun Microsystems) chaired the Workshop on Empirical Studies of Software Engineering, WESS98. Pfleeger will be program co-chair of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, to be held in Amsterdam in 2003.

Dr. Pfleeger has been named repeatedly by the Journal of Systems and Software as one of the world's top software engineering researchers. Among her books are Introduction to Discrete Structures (with David Straight; Wiley, 1985), Software Engineering: The Production of Quality Software (Macmillan, 1987 and 1991), Software Metrics: A Rigorous and Practical Approach (with Nornan Fenton; PWS Publishing, 1997), Applying Software Metrics (with Paul Oman; IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997), and Software Engineering: Theory and Practice (second edition, Prentice Hall, 2001). She is a co-author, with Les Hatton and Chuck Howell, of Solid Software (Prentice Hall PTR, 2001), about how to manage projects building safety-critical software. Her next book, Security in Computing, third edition, co-authored by Charles Pfleeger, will be published by Prentice Hall in November 2002.