Emina Torlak is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

and

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

whose research concerns

software verification Software verification is a discipline of software engineering whose goal is to assure that software fully satisfies all the expected requirements. Broad scope and classification A broad definition of verification makes it equivalent to software t ...

program synthesis In computer science, program synthesis is the task to construct a program that provably satisfies a given high-level formal specification. In contrast to program verification, the program is to be constructed rather than given; however, both fiel ...

, and the integration of these techniques into domain-specific languages. She is an associate professor of computer science at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

, and a senior principal scientist for

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

Education and career

Torlak was educated in computer science at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

, earning a bachelor's degree in 2003, a master's degree in 2004, and completing her Ph.D. in 2009. Her dissertation, ''A constraint solver for software engineering: finding models and cores of large relational specifications'', was supervised by Daniel Jackson. She worked as a researcher for

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research or ...

, LogicBlox, and the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

from 2008 to 2014, before becoming an assistant professor at the University of Washington in 2014. She was promoted to associate professor in 2018, and added an affiliation with Amazon Web Services in 2021.

Recognition

Torlak was 2016 winner of the Junior

Dahl–Nygaard Prize The Dahl–Nygaard Prize is awarded annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions and a younger researcher who has demonstrated great potential. The senior prize is recognized as one of the most prestigious prizes in the are ...

, "for her work on developing tools and methodologies to help build better software more easily". She was the 2021 winner of the

ACM SIGPLAN SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on programming languages. Conferences * Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) * Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) * International Symposium on ...

Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, recognizing her as "a leader in the area of automated verification".

References

External links

Home page
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Torlak, Emina Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists American women computer scientists Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni University of Washington faculty Dahl–Nygaard Prize