I am a PhD Student studying at Victoria University of Wellington. My supervisors are David Pearce and James Noble and my thesis topic is "First-Class Relationships for Object-Oriented Languages".

Relationships, or associations, are semantic links between objects which capture some form of meaningful interaction between them. For example, a student object may be enrolled in a course object. I believe that support for relationships are an important part of the object-oriented paradigm which are overlooked by many practitioners. There is good support for relationships in modelling languages like UML, but there is very limited support for relationships in implementation languages like Java. My research is primarily concerned with devising an abstraction for implementation languages which will allow relationships to be used more easily.