Students
I have supervised eleven PhD students to completion as principal supervisor or co-supervisor — including Bianca Trinkenreich, whose dissertation received the 2024 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Dissertation Award.
Current PhD students
- Pedro A. Oliveira (NAU, 2024–current) — open source governance as a foundation for project sustainability
- Jacob McAuley Penney (NAU, 2023–current) — LLMs to support computational thinking and developer learning
- Morgan Nicholson (NAU, 2025–current) — conversational agents in developer support
PhD alumni
- Ana Claudia Maciel (UEM, 2026) — communication channels in open source · on the job market
- Italo Santos (NAU, 2024) — now Assistant Professor, University of Hawaii
- Simone de França Tonhão (UEM, 2023) — now Assistant Professor, UFMS
- Fabio Santos (NAU, 2023) — now Research Associate, Colorado State University
- Marcia Lima (UFAM, 2023)
- Bianca Trinkenreich (NAU, 2022) — now Assistant Professor, Colorado State University
- Patricia Matsubara (UFAM, 2022) — now Associate Professor, UFMS
- Mairieli Wessel (USP, 2021) — now Assistant Professor, Radboud University
- Williamson Silva (UFAM, 2020) — now Assistant Professor, UFCA
- Jefferson Silva (USP, 2019) — now Lecturer at Inteli / Associate Director, PUC-SP
- Alexandre Lazaretti Zanatta (PUCRS, 2018)
M.Sc. alumni
- Misan Etchie (NAU, 2024–2026)
- Pawan Acharya (NAU, 2025)
- Jacob McAuley Penney (NAU, 2024)
- Simone de França (UEM, 2021)
- Carlos Danilo Luz (UEM, 2021)
- Marcus Vinicius Bertoncello (UEM, 2019)
- Anderson Bergamini de Neira (UEM, 2018)
- Carolina Toscani (PUCRS, 2018)
- João Choma Neto (UEM, 2017)
Prospective Students
In my group (Computer Science / Informatics and Computing, NAU–SICCS), PhD students focus on open source sustainability, human aspects of software engineering, or AI in software development. Admission is through NAU's PhD in Informatics and Computing. When you email me, explicitly mention the research topics you're interested in and show what you have already done related to them.