ACM-W Above and Beyond: Dr Shin Hwei Tan’s Journey
As part of the ACM-W Above and Beyond Project, we are excited to feature Shin Hwei Tan, who is the recipient of the 2025 ACM-W Rising Star Award. This feature is particularly special: we catch up with Dr Tan as we celebrate her remarkable journey—from an ACM-W scholarship recipient to an award-winning researcher and leader in the computing community.
Dr Tan’s research has made a significant impact on the field, with main interests in automated program repair, software testing, and open-source development. She is an Associate Editor for TOSEM ( Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology ) and the Guest Editor-in-Chief for the New Frontier in Software Engineering track in TOSEM. She is also the general chair of FSE26 (ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering), which will be held at Concordia University.
Current role, organization: Associate Professor (Gina Cody Research Chair), Concordia University.
Year of Scholarship and Conference Attendance: IEEE ICST 2012
Country of Origin: Malaysia
Country of residence at the time of receiving ACM-W Scholarship: United States
What has been a highlight of attending the conference (utilizing the ACM-W Scholarship)?
Getting the ACM-W scholarship allowed me to travel to my first conference. The opportunity to meet people was an eye-opening experience for me.
How did attending the ACM-W-sponsored conference impact your career? Did it lead to any important connections in your field?
With the support of the ACM-W scholarship, I got to travel to Montreal, Canada, to attend ICST 2012. I received a lot of positive feedback for my first presentation. My paper from the conference, “@tComment: Testing Javadoc Comments to Detect Comment-Code Inconsistencies”, still remains one of my most cited papers. Looking back on my experience, I think that attending the conference in Montreal also made me fall in love with the city. It is hard to believe that after so many years, I am now working as an Associate Professor in Montreal.
What has been your career highlight? What are you most proud of?
Receiving the ACM-W Rising Star award is definitely one of the key highlights of my research career, as getting recognition for an award that has been selected among female researchers across all computing disciplines really meant a lot for me. With the ACM-W Rising Star award, I feel that I have the responsibility to give back to the ACM-W community, so I founded the ACM-W Montreal Professional Chapter to encourage more researchers and practitioners to discuss emerging topics in computing and network with other amazing female leaders in Montreal.
What aspects of your career have you found challenging?
I like to explore new ideas and new topics in research, but when you are the first to explore them, you need to build everything from scratch (e.g., building a benchmark for evaluation, designing the algorithms and developing the software tools), which is very challenging. Even after building everything, convincing others that the new research direction is worthwhile to explore is another challenging task because people are more comfortable staying within their own comfort zones (more likely to accept ideas or tools that they are more familiar with). For example, recently, I received the New Frontiers in Research Fund from the Government of Canada for a high-risk yet high-impact project on Ethics Testing. I am really grateful for the grant, as it helps to recruit students to join the project and explore this significant problem. At the same time, the research calls for multidisciplinary skills with understanding of various disciplines that are challenging to me. I hope that I can encourage more researchers to have the passion to pursue challenging problems.
Shin and her students having a picnic.
Was the connection to ACM-W helpful or important in any immediate and lasting way?
I am very grateful for the ACM-W scholarship that allowed me to attend my first conference. I always encourage my students and other female students I know to apply for the scholarship.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
I am very grateful that I have the support of many people throughout my career, so I would like to thank my PhD advisor (Abhik Roychoudhury), my Master’s advisors (Darko Marinov, and Lin Tan), my lovely husband (Heng Li), my colleagues at Concordia University and Southern University of Science and Technology, and all my adorable students.
