Maria Christakis has received the 2026 ACM-W Rising Star Award, an international honor recognizing outstanding early-career women researchers whose work has made a significant impact.

According to the ACM-W selection committee, Christakis’ research stands out for both its theoretical depth and practical relevance. Committee members noted that her “work spans theory and high-stakes real-world domains,” highlighting her contributions to improving the reliability and trustworthiness of modern computing systems. The committee also emphasized her leadership and success in securing competitive research funding, describing her as “one of the field’s most influential early-career researchers.”

Christakis is internationally recognized for her work on software verification, testing, and reliability-research that aims to ensure that complex software systems behave correctly and safely. Her work bridges foundational theory and real-world applications, addressing critical challenges in areas such as smart contract fuzzing, fairness certification for neural networks, and testing pipelines for zero-knowledge proofs.

About the ACM-W Rising Star Award

The Association for Computing Machinery’s ACM-W initiative promotes the full participation of women across the computing field. The ACM-W Rising Star Award recognizes a woman whose early-career research has had a significant impact on the computing discipline, as measured by factors such as frequent citation of their work, creation of a new research area, a high degree of technology transfer, and/or other positive influences and societal impact. The award is given annually, and the recipient receives a commemorative plaque, and $1,000 stipend.

About Maria Christakis

Maria Christakis is a full professor at TU Wien Informatics, where she leads the Research Unit for Software Engineering. Her research aims to develop theoretical foundations and practical tools for building more reliable and usable software and increasing developer productivity. Christakis is particularly interested in investigating automatic test generation, program analysis, and software verification topics. Before joining TU Wien, she researched at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, the University of Kent in England, Microsoft Research in the US, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. You can find more information here and read our #5QW Interview.

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