Dr. Alan Wassyng is a professor in the department of computing and software, the Director of the McMaster Centre for Software Certification, and Acting Director of the Software Quality Research Laboratory. For 15 years, Dr. Wassyng consulted on software development. During this time, he developed an automated backup system that worked over telephone modem connections for a company in Toronto. He was also hired as a consultant by Ontario Hydro (later Ontario Power Generation, OPG) to work on the software-based shutdown systems for the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, helping OPG develop the methods they now use for safety-critical systems and was a key member of the team that developed the software for Shutdown System One (SDS1).

For his efforts, in 1995 he was awarded (with others) an Ontario Hydro New Technology Award for “Development of Safety-Critical Software Engineering Technology.” He also developed real-time control and monitoring systems for OPG at their Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in the early 1990s. During 1992-1994, Dr. Wassyng consulted with AECL on the development of Shutdown System Two for the Wolsong reactor in South Korea. He is a co-founder of the Software Certification Consortium and Chair of the Steering Committee. Dr. Wassyng is the PI for an IBM funded research project on dependable software for medical devices as part of the recently announced Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (2012), and is a member of the research team on the Automotive Partnership Canada project – NECSIS (2010). He is co-investigator on the ORF-RE project “Certification of Safety-Critical Software-Intensive Systems,” led by McMaster University and awarded in 2009. Chrysler has recently joined this research project. Dr. Wassyng is an investigator on another ORF-RE project “Model-Based Software Engineering” led by the University of Waterloo (PI: Jo Attlee).