Anshul Shah

I am a fourth-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 with program comprehension, AI-assisted programming, and code quality in large code bases. My work is interdisciplinary, encompassing elements of computing education, software engineering, and human-computer interaction (HCI).

As an instructor-of-record, I taught an upper-division software engineering course that I created with Gerald Soosai Raj (my primary advisor) called “Working with Large Code Bases” that teaches students practical skills for modern software development. The course website, including lecture slides, lecture recordings, and the free, online textbook I created are all publicly available. I have been fortunate to receive the 2025 Doctoral Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC San Diego.

In my free time, I love to surf, play board games and geography games, and cook.