Cécile Péraire

Teaching Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Bio

Cécile Péraire has more than 25 years of software engineering experience working in both industry and academia. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland). Following a postdoctoral research fellowship at SRI International and Hewlett Packard, she worked at Rational and IBM where she held various roles covering the many facets of software development. 

Péraire is a teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). She is the recipient of the CMU College of Engineering Dean’s Early Career Fellowship Award, as well as the CMU College of Engineering Philip L. Dowd Fellowship Award for co-founding the distinctive Master of Software Engineering program offered in Silicon Valley, California. 

Péraire has published and taught extensively in her areas of specialization. She has a passion for innovation in practices and tools that enable teams to more effectively develop and deliver software-intensive systems, including how AI can be responsibly leveraged through effective governance.

Teaching

Her teaching philosophy developed through her teaching experience in both industry and academia. It is based on the premise that students learn best when they are active participants in the learning process and that the journey to mastery requires practice. She encourages active learning and practice by creating opportunities for problem-solving and critical thinking in the context of classroom discussions, in-class exercises, and projects of realistic complexity. She values and encourages collaboration and teamwork that are key ingredients of success in the software industry. Furthermore, she aims to instill social and ethical responsibility in students by proposing projects that tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems and encouraging students to consider the social and ethical impact of their work.

Throughout her career, Péraire has taught 16 different undergraduate, graduate, and industry courses (most of them several times) at EPFL, HP, Rational, IBM and CMU. She has contributed to the design of many of these courses. She currently teaches the following courses at CMU:

18652 - Foundations of Software Engineering
18658 - Software Requirements and Interaction Design
18659 - Software Engineering Methods

Details available on the SE Core Courses page.

Education

Ph.D.
Computer Science
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

Research

Software engineering development methods, user-centered software development, continuous product discovery and delivery, software requirements, interaction design, software product management, software quality, continuous measurable process improvement, business processes, empirical studies, and software engineering education in the age of AI.

Publications

Péraire published in new engineering reference book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-4221-6