Anita Sarma

Anita Sarma is a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, where she serves as Associate School Head of Undergraduate Programs. Her research examines how people build software together, and what changes when AI joins the team: how developers come to trust and adopt generative AI, how habitual AI use shapes the way students think and learn, how to design software that works for people with diverse cognitive styles, and how open source communities can stay healthy and sustainable.

Her work combines theories of human cognition with empirical studies to design AI-infused, inclusive tools. She co-directs the GenderMag project, whose methods help teams find and fix inclusivity bugs in software. Her research has received best and distinguished paper awards at ICSE, ICSME, ESEM, CHI, and other venues, and has been featured in The New York Times. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, has served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and chaired the steering committee of the International Conference on Program Comprehension. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University before joining the faculty of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and, later, Oregon State.