Anshul Shah

I am a final-year PhD candidate at UC San Diego advised by Gerald Soosairaj, Leo Porter, and Bill Griswold. My research aims to enhance students’ readiness for careers in software development by identifying and addressing student struggles while working on large code bases. As a result, my research focuses on program comprehension, AI-assisted programming, and code quality, encompassing elements of computing education, empirical software engineering, and human-computer interaction (HCI) research. My research to identify students’ struggles in large code bases received a Best Paper Award at ICER 2025—a premier computing education research venue.

As an instructor-of-record, I have taught 1) an upper-division software engineering course that I co-created with Gerald called “Working with Large Code Bases” and 2) the introductory computer science course for first-time programmers. For the “Working with Large Code Bases” course, the course website, including lecture slides, lecture recordings, and the free, online textbook I created are all publicly available. I received the 2025 Doctoral Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC San Diego for my work to create and teach this course.

In my free time, I love to surf. I learned to surf when I moved to San Diego in 2021 and fell in love with the activity. I try to surf everyday, usually at Scripps Pier in La Jolla. I even took a UCSD course to shape my own, custom surfboard!

In the 2025-2026 academic year, I am on the job market searching for tenure-track academic positions or industry research positions.