Laurie Williams is a Distinguished University Professor in the Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Laurie is a co-director of the NCSU Secure Computing Institute and the NCSU Science of Security Lablet. She is also the Chief Cybersecurity Technologist of the SecureAmerica Institute. Laurie's research focuses on software security; agile software development practices and processes, particularly continuous deployment; and software reliability, software testing and analysis. Laurie has more than 240 refereed publications.
Laurie is an IEEE Fellow. Laurie was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2011, and is an NSF CAREER award winner. In 2009, she was honored to receive the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award. At NCSU, Laurie was named a University Faculty Scholars in 2013. She was inducted into the Research Leadership Academy and awarded an Alumni Association Outstanding Research Award in 2016. In 2006, she won the Outstanding Teaching award for her innovative teaching and is an inductee in the NC State's Academy of Outstanding Teachers.
Laurie leads the Software Engineering Realsearch research group at NCSU. With her students in the Realsearch group, Laurie has been involved in working collaboratively with high tech industries like ABB Corporation, Cisco, IBM Corporation, Merck, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Red Hat, Sabre Airline Solutions, SAS, Tekelec (now Oracle), and other healthcare IT companies. They also extensively evaluate open source software.
Laurie is one of the foremost researchers in agile software development and in the security of healthcare IT applications. She was one of the founders of the first XP/Agile conference, XP Universe, in 2001 in Raleigh which has now grown into the Agile 200x annual conference. She is also the lead author of the book Pair Programming Illuminated and a co-editor of Extreme Programming Perspectives. Laurie is also the instructor of a highly-rated professional agile software development course that has been widely taught in Fortune 500 companies. She also is a certified instructor of John Musa's software reliability engineering course, More Reliable Software Faster and Cheaper.
Laurie received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah, her MBA from Duke University Fuqua School of Business, and her BS in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University. She worked for IBM Corporation for nine years in Raleigh, NC and Research Triangle Park, NC before returning to academia.