Refactoring in my main research interest. Projects in this area usually involve an amount of development (in Java) but the real goal to test some research idea. A successful project in this area will often result in a publication, which is a good thing to have on your CV, and means that people will really get to see your work rather that it being hidden in a project report.
Over the past number of years my students and I have developed a search-based refactoring framework called Code-Imp. Code-Imp enables long sequences of hundreds or thousands of refactorings to be applied to a program without developer intervention. Our workshop paper at ICSE’2011 gives an idea of what the project is about, and this internal working paper gives an idea of what our results are in the project up to 2014. The refactoring projects here mainly involve using the Code-Imp framework