Myra B. Cohen

Myra Cohen is a Professor and the Lanh and Oanh Nguyen Chair in Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Auckland, New Zealand and her M.S. from the University of Vermont where she also spent several years as a Lecturer in the Computer Science Department. She received her B.S. from the School of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. She was the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Award and a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group.

Her research focus is on software testing and self-adaptation of complex systems such highly-configurable, embedded, or cyber-physical software. She also designs testing techniques for scientific and emerging disciplines such as bioinformatics software, molecular programs and quantum computing. She is an ACM distinguished scientist, an IEEE Senior Member, a Better Scientific Software Fellow and a Fellow of Automated Software Engineering. She received the IEEE Technical Council on Software Engineering 2025 Barbora Bühnová Leadership Award for Women in Science and Engineering. She serves on many software engineering conference program committees and was the general chair of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2015, as well as the program co-chair of ICST 2019, ESEC/FSE 2020 and ISSTA 2025.