Qirun Zhang has won an Amazon Research Award for programming languages research. The one-year award contract provides unrestricted funds and Amazon Web Services credits for customer-driven research.

“I am excited to receive the award,” said Zhang, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science (SCS). “As a programming languages researcher, I enjoy what I do and believe it is important to continue working on fundamental problems to improve software reliability.”

He will use the award for interleaved Dyck-reachability research, which makes program analysis simpler and more efficient by eliminating ineffective parts of the graph. This funding will lead to practical tools that can analyze real-world software and foster collaboration with Amazon automated reasoning researchers.

This work has been widely recognized by the research community. Zhang and his students have won a 2020 distinguished paper award at Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), an online conference, for this work. His student, Yuanbo Li, also received a Facebook Fellowship for related research in May.

“Qirun is a world-class leader in programming languages,” SCS Chair Vivek Sarkar said. “It is great to see him receive this opportunity to increase the industrial impact of his research.”