Successfully completing a PhD can be a long and difficult process that requires years of intensive research, writing, and rigorous evaluation. It is also important to understand the intrinsic characteristics of a research area and community. In this keynote presentation, I will provide guidance on how to conduct impactful MDE research leading to a successful PhD dissertation. The talk will offer some MDE-specific and more general lessons learned on how to manage various technical factors and challenges, such as summarizing the state of research in your field, evaluating research artifacts, ensuring useful research results, writing up, choosing publication venues, making your results accessible, etc. It will finish by covering other relevant aspects related to well-being and resilience.

Silvia Abrahão is Full Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain. She is also Director of the Master’s Program in Software Systems Engineering and Technology at UPV. She was previously Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI), the Université catholique de Louvain, and the Ghent University. Her current research interests include the application of AI techniques to support the adaptation of user interfaces, quality assurance in model-driven engineering, empirical assessment of software modeling approaches and the integration of usability/UX into software development. She led eighteen research projects/contracts involving academic and industrial partners. In particular, she led the MULTIPLE (Mutimodeling approach for quality-aware software product lines) project funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation in close collaboration with the Rolls-Royce Software Centre of Excellence. More recently, she has led the Spanish Network of Excellence on Software Quality and Sustainability. From 2011 to 2017 she was the Spanish Editor of ERCIM News, a scientific magazine of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. She is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Software, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) and Automated Software Engineering (AUSE). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief for the TOSEM Continuous Special Section on Human-Centric Software Engineering, and as Co-editor of the IEEE Software Practitioner’s Digest department. She is on the Editorial Board of the Springer Journal of Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) and on the Advisory Editorial Board of the Wiley Journal of Software: Practice and Experience (SPE). She has served as General Co-Chair of ACM/IEEE 17th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2014), PC Co-Chair of MODELS 2020 and Chair of the MODELS Steering Committee. She is currently the ACM Women in Computing Rising Star Award Committee Chair.