
Emeritus Professor
Marian Petre is interested in expertise in software design. Her interdisciplinary research draws on cognitive theory and qualitative research methods to analyze how expert software designers behave and reason when solving design problems. Her research is grounded in empirical studies of actual professional practice in industry. She has investigated software design from a number of different perspectives, including: cognitive dimensions of notations, a whiteboard tool for design, programming paradigms, graphical and textual notations, software visualisation, disciplines of innovation, and how designers learn effective strategies. Most recently, she has been studying the integration of software engineering practices into computational science.