Faculty

Ras Bodik joined the world-class Programming Languages & Software Engineering Group at University of Washington as a Professor after spending more than a decade on the faculty at University of California, Berkeley.

Ras is widely known for his groundbreaking work in programming languages, compilations, and program synthesis, and their application to a broad range of disciplines, including parallel programming, human-computer interaction, and systems biology. His research focuses on making it easier to write computer programs by developing novel programming languages and tools that allow people to obtain a complete program from incomplete instructions. To this end, Ras pioneered the use of algorithmic program synthesis, a technique for computer-aided construction of software based on sketches (partial programs) and constraint solving. His work has led to the development of novel compilers for low-power computing, parallel layout engines for Web browsers, and new tools for generating explanatory hypotheses from biological experiments and for simplifying the creation of data visualizations.

Ras is a regular contributor to the top conferences in programming languages, software engineering and computer architecture. He has earned a number of awards for teaching and research, including an NSF CAREER Award, an ACM SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation Award, two IEEE MICRO Top Picks in Computer Architecture, and Best Paper at PLDI. He is a co-founder of SNAPL, the Summit on Advances in Programming Languages. With his students, he developed an undergraduate course Make Your Language! that teaches foundations of languages and compilation by teaching design of domain-specific languages.

Before arriving at UC Berkeley, Ras was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an academic visitor at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a diploma in Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Košice, Slovakia.