Joel Ouaknine joins the MPI-SWS faculty

Joel Ouaknine joins the institute’s faculty as a scientific director, effective Aug 1, 2016. Joel’s research interests include the automated verification of real-time, probabilistic, and infinite-state systems (e.g. model-checking algorithms, synthesis problems, complexity), logic and applications to verification, decision and synthesis problems for linear dynamical systems, automated software analysis, concurrency, and theoretical computer science.

In 2015, Joel was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant, which provides almost 2 million euros of research funding over a period of five years. He is also the recipient of the 2010 Roger Needham Award, given annually „for a distinguished research contribution in Computer Science by a UK-based researcher within ten years of his or her PhD.“

Joel will join MPI-SWS from the University of Oxford, where he is a Professor of Computer Science and Fellow of St John’s College. Joel holds a BSc and MSc in Mathematics from McGill University, and received his PhD in Computer Science from Oxford in 2001. He subsequently did postdoctoral work at Tulane University and Carnegie Mellon University.