Dr. Reid Holmes named 2025 ACM Distinguished Member
UBC Computer Science Professor Reid Holmes recognized for remarkable contributions to computing
UBC Computer Science Professor Reid Holmes has been named a 2025 Distinguished Member by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) “for contributions to software quality and developer productivity.”
Dr. Holmes is one of 61 professionals from around the world who were honoured this year by the world's leading computing society for their significant technical contributions and/or volunteer service.
“I am honoured that the fantastic work led by the students in the Software Practices Lab has been recognized by the ACM,” says Dr. Holmes. “Without them, none of this would have been possible. I look forward to continuing the exceptional progress they have made over the past decade into the future as we tackle the new challenges emerging technologies place on our professional community. While changes are underway, I believe software engineers will remain crucial to ensuring the reliability and correctness of the systems we rely upon every day.”
Dr. Holmes’ research group is part of the Software Practices Lab, studying various aspects of software development. His group seeks to understand the challenges that software developers face and how software development can be more effective and create more reliable code. Some of his research projects include studies of developer workflows, tools to improve program understanding, end-user programming tools, and tools for understanding how source code evolves.
Over the course of his research career, Dr. Holmes has published 80 peer-reviewed papers. He has received five Distinguished Paper Awards and two Most Influential Paper Awards at top software engineering conferences. For five years, he served as an Associate Editor for the prestigious software engineering journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE).
Since becoming a computer science professor at UBC in 2015, Dr. Holmes has taught software engineering courses and mentored nearly 30 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. To help teaching assistants spend more time engaging with students and less time marking assignments, he developed an automatic grading tool, AutoTest, that helps give useful feedback to over 1,000 students each year.
Before coming to UBC, Dr. Holmes was a professor at the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Prior to that, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Calgary and his MSc and BSc in computer science from the University of British Columbia.