Dr. Huzefa Kagdi is an impact-driven educator, researcher, and administrator in higher education with professional experience spanning across public and private sectors. He has been serving as the Interim Dean and then Dean of U.A. Whitaker College of Engineering at FGCU since August of 2021. He joined FGCU as the Department Chair and Full Professor of Software Engineering in June of 2019. Prior to FGCU, he was an Associate Professor with tenure and served as the Graduate Coordinator/Director of MS programs in Computer Science and Computer Networking, Graduate certificate program in Information Assurance and Security, and PhD program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Wichita State University (WSU).

His leadership philosophy is a blend of servant and transformational leadership styles. He strongly believes that the foremost role of an academic leader is to serve students and those who empower them, foster an inclusive, collaborative, and synergistic environment of knowledge acquisition and sharing, and work relentlessly to secure requisite resources – all oriented towards best serving the institutional mission.

He has always found teaching immensely fulfilling and rewarding. It is a unique and enriching feeling to be surrounded by exceptionally bright students. He could hardly wait to welcome new and returning students each new semester. His primary teaching interests at the introductory level, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, are in computer science and software engineering. At the advanced level, he taught courses in software engineering with an emphasis on software evolution/maintenance, and empirical software engineering.

His primary research work, publications, and external funding are in Software Engineering with emphasis on software data science, software analytics, mining software repositories, empirical software engineering, program comprehension, source code analysis, and software visualization. He established and directed a research and service unit, namely Software Engineering Research and Services (SERS) laboratory, which had a successfully start in attracting extramural funding from a local technology company at WSU. He formed a solid, impactful research program of international visibility in this area, which was reflected by external funding, top-tier publications, an influential paper in academia and industry award, mentored/graduated (including minority) students, and national/international collaborations of high research activity.