Ajitha Rajan

Research

I am a Professor (Personal Chair of Software Testing and Verification) at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. My background includes postdoctoral positions at Oxford University and Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble. I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota (Aug 2009) under Prof. Mats Heimdahl.

My research focuses on two main directions:

Automated Software Testing — Test input generation, test oracles, and coverage
Biomedical AI — Cancer survival models, interpretability for biological sequences & medical images

I'm actively recruiting PhD students with strong programming and research skills in either software testing/program analysis/compilers (C++/Python) or explainability for NLP/CV with familiarity in bioinformatics.

Teaching

Software Testing (ST) — 3rd year UG (JUnit, practical testing concepts)
Introduction to Software Engineering (Inf2C-SE) — 2nd year UG

Open Positions

Fully funded PhD positions (UK/EU); exceptional overseas students may be considered. I also supervise CDT-funded students — see below for links.

Current Funded Projects

MANIFEST (2024–2028) — Cancer Immunotherapy Response Research Platform led by Francis Crick Institute (MRC funded)
Huawei Joint Lab project (2024–2026) — RobustCheck: Testing Robustness of Compiler Optimisations and Deep Learning Frameworks
Royal Society Industry Fellowship (2022–2025) — AutoTest: Testing AV perception on hardware accelerators (industry collaboration: Codeplay Ltd.)
KATY (2021–2025) — Edinburgh Lead PI — Clinical knowledge for personalised medicine for renal cancer (Horizon 2020 funded)

Research Group

Current PhD students & Postdocs

Amy Rafferty — Explainable AI for medical image analysis
Yulin Jin — Scenario-based testing for autonomous driving
Piyush Borole — Explainable AI for Biomedical Applications
Hans-Cristof Gasser — Tunable Immune Visibility in Protein Design

Past Students & Alumni

Panos Stratis — Software test suite compilation & execution optimisations
Vanya Yaneva — Accelerating test executions on GPUs
Chao Peng — Test generation & coverage for GPU programs
Sefa Akca — Automated testing of smart contracts on blockchains
Foivos Tsimpourlas — Machine learning for compiler optimisations
Tongjie Wang — Multimodal Survival Analysis for Glioma
Nick Louloudakis — Automated testing of Deep Learning Frameworks
Xiaoliang Wu — Automated testing of speech recognition systems

Selected Projects

AutoTest (Royal Society Industry Fellowship) — Testing autonomous vehicle perception safety on hardware accelerators (Codeplay collaboration). Fully funded PhD studentship available.
KATY (H2020) — AI for Genomics and Personalised Medicine; Edinburgh Lead PI; focus on clinical knowledge & NLP for renal cancer.
EPSRC Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Node — Governance and regulation; UAVs and medical diagnostics focus.