Nathan Cassee wins the Distinguished Doctoral Research Award at MSR 2025

02-Apr-2025

Nathan Cassee, who has recently defended his PhD thesis at Eindhoven University of Technology and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of Victoria, Canada, has won the Distinguished Doctoral Research Award at the 22nd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2025). The award committee wrote that Nathan’s work “stands out for its diversity and rigor in research methods.”

Nathan’s goal was to understand how expressions of emotions and opinions affect software engineering. One of his most unexpected discoveries was that while software developers claim their decisions are based purely on technical factors, experiments showed otherwise. When descriptions of software issues contained negative language, developers consistently rated them as more urgent, even when the technical content remained the same. This reveals a previously unknown human bias affecting decision-making in software engineering. His thesis was awarded the highest distinction (cum laude) in Eindhoven and now is recognized by the MSR community!