Robert Zhang has been selected as the 2023 recipient of the Department of Computer Science’s Masson Fellowship. Established in 2018 to honor the department’s inaugural chair, Gerald M. Masson, the fellowship recognizes and supports select students enrolled in the combined bachelor’s/master’s degree program.
Masson Fellows enrolled full-time receive a 25% tuition waiver for the semester in which they are conducting their research, allowing them to transition into graduate-level research following the completion of their undergraduate studies.
Graduating with an MSE in May 2024, Zhang currently works in the Programming Languages Laboratory under Professor Scott Smith, the director of graduate studies for the Department of Computer Science. Zhang previously worked with Ali Madooei, an associate teaching professor of computer science, to build software platforms for higher education.
Zhang’s research interests lie in developing and applying formal reasoning techniques in programming languages to improve the efficacy and performance of real-world systems.
“This fellowship is a testament to the value of this line of work and will help me delve further into hard problems in static program analysis,” they say. “It will also allow me to focus more on exploring adjacent areas that interest me, like formal verification and automated reasoning, and, most importantly, to use these techniques to strengthen intermittent and distributed computing systems in the wild.”
Zhang attributes their interest in programming languages research partly to their appreciation and enjoyment of functional programming over the brittle programming patterns in JavaScript and other imperative languages.
For more information on the combined bachelor’s/master’s program, click here.