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About Cécile Péraire

Dr. Cécile Péraire has over 25 years of software engineering experience working in both industry and academia. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland). Following a postdoctoral research fellowship at SRI International and Hewlett Packard, she worked at Rational and IBM where she played different roles covering the many facets of software development. She has contributed significantly to the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and IBM's internal methods. 

Dr. Péraire is currently a Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University​ (CMU)​​ ​in the ​department of Electrical and Computer Engineering​ (ECE). ​She is a recipient of CMU College of Engineering Dean’s Early Career Fellowship Award, as well as CMU College of Engineering Philip L. Dowd Fellowship Award for her ​contribution to ​the development of ECE’s unique and distinctive Software Engineering Master​ ​program​ ​offered ​in Silicon Valley​, California​. She has published and taught extensively in her areas of specialization. She has a passion for innovation in practices and tools that enable teams to more effectively develop and deliver software-intensive ​systems.

Areas of interest: Software engineering development methods, user-centered software development, software requirements, interaction design, software product management, software quality, continuous measurable process improvement, business processes, empirical studies, and software engineering education.

Teaching: Dr. Péraire's teaching philosophy has formed while teaching in both industry and academia. Her philosophy is based on the premises that students learn best when they are active participant in the learning process, and that the journey to mastery requires practice. She encourages active learning and practice by creating opportunities for problem-solving and critical thinking in the context of classroom discussions, in-class exercises, and projects of realistic complexity. She values and encourages collaboration and teamwork that are key ingredients of success in the software industry. Furthermore, she aims to instill social and ethical responsibility in students by proposing projects tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems and encouraging students to consider the social and ethical impact of their work.

Throughout her career, Dr. Péraire taught 16 different undergraduate, graduate, and industry courses (most of them several times) at EPFL, HP, Rational, IBM and CMU. She has contributed to the design of many of these courses. Here are the courses that she is currently teaching at CMU:
 

Positions

Present Assistant Teaching Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
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Disciplines


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Honors and Awards

  • CMU CIT Philip L. Dowd Fellowship Award - Contribution to the development of ECE’s unique and distinctive Software Engineering Master’s degree program (2016)
  • CMU CIT Dean’s Early Career Fellowship Award – Teaching and Leadership (2018)

Highlights (10)

ICSE Papers (6)

User-Centered Software Development (4)

Software Engineering Education (11)