6.3 About the Author

James C. Davis is an assistant professor of software engineering in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. His work appears at venues such as ICSE and IEEE S&P and has been recognized with three ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper awards. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2026. His lab is supported by the NSF, Google, Rolls-Royce, Cisco, Socket, and OpenAI. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and co-editor of the column "Practicing AI" in IEEE Computer.

Dr. Davis came to the professoriate by way of industry. He spent five years as a software engineer at IBM (2012–2015), where he wrote roughly a hundred thousand lines of Perl and C/C++ test infrastructure, trained engineers at international sites, and broke his team record for most defects opened in a year. He earned his PhD from Virginia Tech in 2020. The methodology in this book thus rests on sixteen years of software engineering experience that straddles the GenAI divide.