Dawson R. Engler 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 an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University.

Career

After graduating from

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. ...

, Engler earned his Ph.D. from 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 ...

in 1998 while working with

Frans Kaashoek Marinus Frans (Frans) Kaashoek (born 1965, Leiden) is a Dutch computer scientist, entrepreneur, and Charles Piper Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2006) for cont ...

in the

MIT CSAIL Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group. The focus of his graduate studies was the

exokernel Exokernel is an operating system kernel developed by the MIT Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group, and also a class of similar operating systems. Operating systems generally present hardware resources to applications through high-lev ...

. Engler is currently an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. In 2002, he co-founded

Coverity Coverity is a proprietary static code analysis tool from Synopsys. This product enables engineers and security teams to find and fix software defects. Coverity started as an independent software company in 2002 at the Computer Systems Laborator ...

with several of his students to commercialize his group's work in

static code analysis In computer science, static program analysis (or static analysis) is the analysis of computer programs performed without executing them, in contrast with dynamic program analysis, which is performed on programs during their execution. The term ...

for bug-finding technology.

Awards and honors

Engler and his co-authors received the Best Paper award at USENIX's OSDI conferences in 2000, 2004, and 2008. With his students Cristian Cadar and Daniel Dunbar, he was jointly awarded the 2018 SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award for their paper at the 2008 conference. Engler won the 2006

SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award The ACM SIGOPS (Special Interest Group on Operating Systems) Mark Weiser Award is awarded to an individual who has shown creativity and innovation in operating system research. The recipients began their career no earlier than 20 years prior to nomi ...

for his work in

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s research. In 2008, he received the

Grace Murray Hopper Award The Grace Murray Hopper Award (named for computer pioneer RADM Grace Hopper) has been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1971. The award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or ser ...

for "ground-breaking work on automated program checking and bug-finding".

Selected publications

* * * * *

References

External links

Dawson Engler
on the Stanford University website * {{DEFAULTSORT:Engler, Dawson Living people American computer scientists Programming language researchers Software testing people Arizona State University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Stanford University faculty Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering faculty Grace Murray Hopper Award laureates Year of birth missing (living people)