Portrait of Sarah Fakhoury

Sarah Fakhoury

Senior Researcher

About

I am a Senior Researcher in the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) Team at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA. My research centers around ways to improve the design and evaluation of software development tools to optimize the cognitive effort of programmers.  I am currently interested in leveraging formal methods as a mechanism to provide end-user trust and verifiability of AI-assisted programming tools. My approach to research is largely interdisciplinary, fusing: formal methods, empirical software engineering, machine learning, and human-computer interaction.

In 2022, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Washington State University. My dissertation identified empirical perspectives of developer productivity in practice and introduced a novel framework to model sources of cognitive load during program comprehension in real-working environments. You can learn more about my research and publications on my personal webpage.