SEAS graduate student awarded Facebook Fellowship

Facebook certainly "likes" Gregory Malecha, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

The social media giant awarded Malecha a 2012-13 Facebook Fellowship. As a fellow, he will enjoy fully paid tuition and fees for the academic year. He will also receive a $30,000 stipend, money towards conference travel and a personal computer, and have an opportunity to apply for a paid summer internship at Facebook.

Malecha, who is advised by Greg Morrisett, Allen B. Cutting Professor of Computer Science at SEAS, works on program verification and topics in high-level programming languages.

He became interested in compiler and programming language technology while an undergraduate at Rice University, where he worked on multistage programming.

He believes that programming language technology has the potential to radically improve both the efficiency and the trustworthiness of modern software.

"The core of my research is addressing the trustworthiness of software," Malecha wrote in his fellowship application. "The complexity of systems like Linux and language run-times like Java has dwarfed even the substantial complexity of physical projects like bridges, skyscrapers and utility systems. Understanding even small parts of these software (and hardware) systems is becoming increasingly difficult. This makes bugs the norm, exposing users and companies to bad experiences and security breaches."

With help from the Facebook Fellowship, he plans to research how extensible program logics can be used to reason about low-level, concurrent software. Malecha's aim is to implement the right abstractions to enable compositional, high-level reasoning about programs while retaining the ability to optimize them.

To this end, he will work on a program logic for compiler intermediate representations that support concurrency.

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Created in 2009, the Facebook Fellowship supports 12 Ph.D. students doing groundbreaking research. Each Facebook Fellowship includes:

• Tuition and fees paid for the academic year
• $30K stipend (paid over 9 months of the academic year)
• $5K per year toward conference attendance and travel
• $2.5K toward a personal computer
• Opportunity to apply for a paid summer internship
• Recipients are responsible for the taxation on any funds

For more information visit: https://www.facebook.com/fellowships?sk=info