Congratulations to PLAS on four successful promotions in 2021

Many congratulations to Professor Mark Batty, Dr Laura Bocchi, Dr Dominic Orchard and Dr Stefan Marr of the Programming Languages and Systems (PLAS) group at the School of Computing, who have all been promoted this academic year.

Mark Batty has been promoted to Professor. He develops rigorous mathematical specifications, testing tools, and verification techniques for real-world concurrent systems, focusing on established interfaces (e.g. C, C++ and, OpenCL) and concrete testable artifacts (e.g. x86, Power, ARM CPUs, and Nvidia, AMD GPUs).

Laura Bocchi has been promoted to Reader. Laura works on formal verification of distributed and service-oriented systems. With her STARDUST project, she will develop session types further to increase the reliability of distributed systems.

Dominic Orchard has been promoted to Senior Lecturer. He works at the intersection of types, semantics, and logic, with a focus on programming languages and verification. Via his EPSRC-funded Granule project, he works on capturing program properties as graded (modal) types to improve program reasoning. He also develops static analysis and verification tools designed for use in computational science, for which he has industry funding.

Stefan Marr has been promoted to Senior Lecturer. Stefan works on programming language implementation, optimizations, concurrency, and tooling for debugging. His recent Royal Society Industry Fellowship focuses on optimizing interpreters for multi-million line applications in collaboration with Shopify.

Head of School, Professor Peter Rodgers said: ‘I’d like to congratulate those promoted this year, they have really deserved this recognition. It really demonstrates the strength in depth of the Programming Languages and Systems Research Group here at the University of Kent. All those promoted have published world class publications and performed excellent teaching. Each one of them has been successful in getting research funding and has international collaborations with leading academics and industry’.

The Programming Languages and Systems (PLAS) group is also looking forward to grow further and invites applications for 2 lecturer positions at the School. You can find more information about the roles and application details at the link below – application deadline Thursday 21 October 2021:
https://jobs.kent.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=CEMS-034-21-R-R