Suraj Ajit first studied Computer Science and Engineering at Bangalore University in India. He attained a first class degree and came to the UK to pursue PhD study in Computing at the University of Aberdeen under Professor Derek Sleeman in a multi-million pound Advanced Knowledge Technologies project. He also worked as a part-time Research Assistant in the project. His thesis involved collaborative work with Rolls-Royce.

Suraj then worked as a Software Engineer for the University of Dundee in a two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership project with a start-up company. On successful completion of the project, he joined BAE Systems as a Research Scientist and worked in the area of model-based software engineering for three years.

Suraj joined the Computing and Immersive Technologies department at the University of Northampton in 2011. He is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Software Engineering. He teaches modules in Software Engineering for both undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses. 

Suraj is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He has experience of both external validation and examining of undergraduate courses in other higher education institutions in the UK.

Suraj’s research interests lie in the areas of model-based software engineering, ontology, semantic web and pedagogy.  He is the principal investigator of a jointly funded research project in model-based software engineering with GE Aviation. The project is looking at effective ways to capture high-level requirements in an unambiguous machine interpretable format and automate generation of test cases. He is supervising Oyindamola Olajubu who is a research student working on this project.

Suraj is also interested in pedagogy in the areas of assessment and feedback. He has obtained several undergraduate research bursaries at Northampton to work on automated marking and feedback of assessments to enhance student learning, experience and engagement.

Suraj also supervises two other research students:

• Tom Butler – working on creating a metric to measure software quality in object-oriented programming.
• Naktal Edan – investigating methods to improve existing communication protocols in mobile health systems.

Suraj has experience of working in Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) and other industrial research projects involving Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems. He welcomes doctoral proposals in the areas of software engineering, applied computing and pedagogical research.

Thomas Butler; Computing

Creating a metric to measure software flexibility in Object-Oriented Programming.

Course Leader for BSc (Hons)/HND Software Engineering.

Teaching on the following modules:

• CSY1019 – Software Engineering1
• CSY2030 – System Design and Development
• CSY2006 – Software Engineering2
• CSYM025 – Visual Object Software (MSc)
• CSYM026 – Software Engineering (MSc)
• CSY4010 – MSc/BSc Dissertations (supervision)