PhD student · Computer Science · George Washington University
I work on programming languages and security — specifically, making the unsafe corners of systems code provably safer.
I am a first-year PhD student at George Washington University, advised by Jie Zhou. My research sits at the seam between programming-language theory and systems security: Rust gives us strong guarantees for most code, but the moment a program reaches for unsafe, those guarantees become a promise the compiler cannot keep.
I build tools and evidence for that boundary — static analyses that find the violations, benchmark suites that make tool claims comparable, and verification techniques cheap enough that working engineers will adopt them. Before the PhD I spent my time writing systems code and being annoyed by exactly these problems.
I am open to internship and collaboration conversations, particularly with groups working on Rust tooling, compiler analyses, or formal methods for systems software.
Rust's guarantees stop at the unsafe boundary. I study what actually breaks there — aliasing violations, lifetime laundering through raw pointers, FFI-crossing invariants — and build analyses that catch it before it ships.
Soundness claims are only as good as the programs you test them on. I curate and generate benchmark suites from real-world unsafe code so that tool comparisons measure capability rather than tuning.
Proof obligations that a systems engineer will actually discharge. Lightweight verification and refinement typing aimed at the annotation budget people really have.
I run — mostly the Mall loop and Rock Creek, early, before the humidity makes its case.