Pedro Oliveira
PhD Student · Graduate Research & Teaching Assistant
Northern Arizona University
About
I am a PhD student in Informatics at Northern Arizona University (expected 2028), supervised by Dr. Igor Steinmacher and Dr. Marco Gerosa. My research examines how governance structures shape the health and sustainability of open source software projects.
Research. I am a member of the RESHAPE Lab, where my dissertation studies governance across five empirical studies — from how projects define and document roles, to how governance restructuring affects community dynamics. Two studies are published; three are underway.
Background. Before the PhD, I worked as a Data Engineer in Brazil (2022–2024), which grounds my research in the practical realities of software production. I hold a Bachelor's in Software Engineering from the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS).
Recognition. Best Paper Award at CHASE 2026, Best Short Paper Award at SESoS 2023, and the 2026 Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award at NAU.
// every square is a contribution — My research seeks to understand why and how they happen.
Research
OSS Governance
How open source projects define, document, and reform governance structures — and how those structures affect contributor roles, decision-making, and project health.
Community Sustainability
Dynamics of contributor communities in software ecosystems, including migration patterns, ecosystem death signals, and the social networks that hold projects together.
Empirical Methods in SE
Mining software repositories, mixed-methods research, and large-scale repository analysis to ground governance findings in real-world project data.
Service
Conference organization
- Program Co-Chair — OSS Governance & Community Sustainability Track, FOSSY 2026
- Web Co-Chair — Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2027, MSR 2026)
Student volunteer
- International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026)
- International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2024)
Contact
Email: Pedro.Oliveira@nau.edu
School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems
Northern Arizona University — Flagstaff, AZ, USA