Navigating the research community can be challenging for early-career researchers, such as PhD students. This panel discussion brings together experts from both the ECSA and SPLC communities to share their insights and experiences on building a successful presence in the scientific community, which is often imperative for a successful research career. We will discuss the role of networking and collaboration, we will share the strategies of our speakers on how to communicate one’s research to increase its visibility, and add some tips on effective career planning.

Bio of Ralf Reussner: After studying computer science at the University of Karlsruhe (T.H.) and receiving his doctorate there in 2001 Ralf Reussner worked as a senior research scientist at DSTC Pty Ltd in Melbourne. From 2003 he was awarded with a junior research group “Palladio” within German Science Foundation Emmy Noether Excellence Programme while being one of the scientific directors at the OFFIS-Institute for technology transfer and Junior Professor at Ubiversity of Oldenburg. At the age of 33, he accepted an offer for professorship (W3) in software engineering at the University of Karlsruhe (T.H.), later declining offers on full professorships from Universities Osnabrueck, Hamburg and TU Munich. In summer 2006 he was appointed as the youngest director of the FZI Research Centre for Information Technology in Karlsruhe. 2011-2017 he was member of the Executive Board of the FZI. Ralf was co-founder of the “International Conference on the Quality of Software Architecture” series in 2005, one of the pillars of today’s “International Conference on Software Architecture”. Since 2023, Ralf Reussner has been the spokesperson for the newly established special research area Convide - Consistency in the View-based Development of Cyber-Physical Systems, where he researches on consistency between views in the development of software-intensive systems together with over 70 scientists from TU Munch, TU Dresden and U Mannheim.

Bio of Gilles Perrouin: I am a FNRS Research associate (“chercheur qualifié”) at the Namur Digital Institute (NADI) and the Faculty of Computer Science of the University of Namur in Belgium. After I received my PhD jointly from the Universities of Luxembourg and Namur in 2007, I held several postdoctoral positions at the universities of Rennes, Luxembourg and Namur. My research interests involve quality assurance of variability-intensive, intelligent, complex systems and software testing techniques to achieve more ethical and sustainable machine learning. I am a member of IEEE and ACM. Since 2020, I am an associate editor at the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology journal.

Bio of Elena Navarro: Elena Navarro is a full professor at the Computing Systems Department of the UCLM (Spain) where she lectures in Software Engineering. Prior to this position, she did research at the Computer Science Laboratory of the AUA (Greece) funded by the EU TMR Program. She had previously served on the staff of the Regional Government of Murcia. She is author of more than 100 papers, being more than 40 papers in relevant journals indexed in JCR, regarding software architecture, requirements engineering, and HCI. She is involved in numerous R&D projects as well as in Knowledge transfer projects. Her current research interests is related to the design and evaluation of technologies applied to healthcare, specially, as well as the design and development of Digital Twins with a special focus on Software Architecture and Requirements Engineering