Research Group
Students, postdocs, and collaborators
November 12, 2025
Hiring
I am currently looking for talented PhD students to work on projects in computer security and software quality! See my research summary for an overview, including in-flight projects, and my publications for specific past work.
Current and former group
Since I’ve been at Penn, I am pleased to be working with Noopur Bhatt (advised by Sebastian Angel) and Thia Richey and Joe Cutler (both advised by Benjamin Pierce).
While I was at UMD, I worked with many talented post-docs and students. They are now off doing amazing things!
Post-doctoral Researchers
| Liyi Li | 2023 | Assistant Professor, Iowa State |
| Ethan Cecchetti | 2023 | Assistant Professor, Wisconsin |
| Michael Coblenz | 2022 | Assistant Professor, UCSD |
| Leonidas Lampropoulos | 2020 | Assistant Professor, University of Maryland |
| Robert Rand | 2020 | Assistant Professor, University of Chicago |
| Shiyi Wei | 2017 | Associate Professor, University of Texas at Dallas |
| Matthew Hammer | 2015 | Research scientist at DFinity 2019-2023; previously Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder |
| Nataliya Guts | 2012 | Security Solutions Engineer, Futurae |
| Stephen Magill | 2012 | Principal Scientist, Amazon Web Services, since 2025; formerly VP, Product Innovation at Sonatype, 2021-2025; CEO of MuseDev; Principal scientist, Galois, 2014-2020; researcher at IDA/CCS, 2012-2014 |
| Manuel Oriol | 2008 | President of Constructor Institute and Professor of Software Engineering, since 2021; Principal Scientist, R&D manager at ABB Switzerland Ltd. 2011-2021; Senior Lecturer, University of York (UK), 2008-2014 |
PhD Students
| Kesha Hietala | 2022 | A Verified Software Toolchain for Quantum Programming Researcher, Sandia National Labs, since October 2024; previously Applied Scientist, Amazon Web Services, July 2022-October 2024 |
| Ian Sweet | 2022 | Language-Based Techniques for Secure Programming Researcher, IDA/CCS; previously Research Engineer, Galois, July 2022-April 2025 |
| James Parker | 2020 | Advanced Language-based Techniques for Correct, Secure Networked Systems Software research engineer, Galois, since June 2020 |
| Andrew Ruef | 2018 | Tools and Experiments for Software Security Quantitative Researcher at IDA/CCS February 2019-2021 |
| Chang Liu**** | 2016 | Trace Oblivious Program Execution Researcher at Citadel Securities since 2019; previously post-doc at UC Berkeley, 2016-2018; |
| Aseem Rastogi | 2016 | Language-based Techniques for Practical and Trustworthy Secure Multi-Party Computations Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India since June 2016 |
| Luis Pina*** | 2016 | Practical Dynamic Software Updating (for Java) Assistant Professor at University of Illinois, Chicago, since Fall'19; previously post-doc at George Mason (Aug 2017-19) and Imperial College, London (Mar 2015-Aug 2017) |
| Karla Saur* | 2015 | Dynamic Upgrades for High Availability Systems Distributed Systems Engineer, Nvidia DGX Cloud since October 2024; previously a researcher at Microsoft (2018-2024) and Intel Labs (2015-2018) |
| Piotr Mardziel | 2015 | Modeling, Quantifying, and Limiting Adversary Knowledge Head of AI, RealmLabs; previously, Systems Scientist at CMU (previously, post-doc) June 2016-2020; post-doc at UMD Jan'15 - Jun'16 |
| Khoo Yit Phang* | 2013 | User-centered Program Analysis Tools Senior Team Lead at MathWorks since August 2013 |
| Chris Hayden* | 2012 | Clear, Correct, and Efficient Dynamic Software Updates Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services since Mar. 2020; previously at SocialCode 2015-2019; WaPo Labs/Trove 2012-2015 |
| Justin McCann | 2012 | Automating Performance Diagnosis in Networked Systems Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, since 2018; previously, technical staff, Avere Systems from 2012 |
| Martin Ma* | 2011 | Improving Program Testing and Understanding via Symbolic Execution Software Engineer at Google since 2013 (previously at Amazon) |
| Saurabh Srivastava* | 2010 | Satisfiability-based Program Reasoning and Program Synthesis Founder, Synthetic Minds, since 2017; founder, 20n, 2013-2017; post-doc at Berkeley 2012-2014 |
| Pavlos Papageorgiou | 2008 | The Measurement Manager: Modular and Efficient End-to-end Measurement Services Software Engineer, Google (AI), since December 2008 |
| Iulian Neamtiu | 2008 | Practical Dynamic Software Updating Professor, NJIT, since Fall 2015; at UC Riverside, 2008-2015. |
| Polyvios Pratikakis* | 2008 | Sound, precise, and efficient static race detection for multithreaded programs Associate professor in CS, University of Crete, since 2014; researcher, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, 2010-2014; post-doc at CNRS/VERIMAG 2008-2009 |
| Nikhil Swamy | 2008 | Language-based Enforcement of User-defined Security Policies as Applied to Multi-tier Web Programs Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, Redmond, since Fall 2008 |
| Nick L. Petroni** | 2008 | Property-based Integrity Monitoring of Operating System Kernels Chief scientist, Volexity, since 2015; research scientist, IDA/CCS 2008-2015 |
Masters Students
| Yiyun Liu | 2021 | PhD student, University of Pennsylvania, since September 2021 |
| Nate Parsons | 2012 | Implementing and Typing a Core Calculus for Mixed-mode Secure Multi-party Computations (scholarly paper) Missions software engineer at Planet since 2013; previously, engineer at JHUAPL |
| * co-advised with Jeff Foster | ** co-advised with Bill Arbaugh | *** co-advised with Luís Veiga | **** co-advised with Elaine Shi |
I have also worked closely with Kelsey Fulton and Dan Votipka (advised by Michelle Mazurek), Aravind Machiry (PhD student interned at UMD, advised by Giovanni Vigna and Chris Kruegel at UCSB), Niki Vazou (postdoc supervised by David Van Horn), David Darais (advised by David Van Horn), Andrew Miller (co-advised with Jon Katz and Elaine Shi), Avik Chaudhuri, Mike Furr, David An, and Elnatan Reisner (advised by Jeff Foster), Adam Bender (advised by Bobby Bhattacharjee), Jaime Spacco (advised by Bill Pugh), and Suriya Subramanian (advised by Kathryn McKinley while at UT Austin). I have previously advised Willem Wyndham, Jonathan Turpie (now at Amazon), Brian Corcoran (now at Palantir), Eric Hardisty, and James Rose (now at Google). I’ve also worked with post-grad Patrick Jenkins, and undergrads Jeff Meister and Ted Smith, as well as high school students Yael Pinsky, George Klees, Matt McCutchen, and Cody Burton (from Montgomery Blair High School; Ted Smith was from Walt Whitman High). Both Ted and Matt later became undergraduate students at UMD and Ted, Matt, and Cody all went to graduate school (at UMass, MIT CSAIL, and MIT Physics, respectively). I ended up working with Matt at Correct Computation.