Faculty Recruiting Support CICS

Arjun Guha joins CS faculty

Arjun Guha joins the school this fall as an Assistant Professor, where he will co-lead the PLASMA (Programming Languages And Systems at MAssachusetts) group. Guha conducts research in programming languages and enjoys applying his work to other domains.

"A programming language is a medium of expression. It is how programmers communicate their intent to machines and their ideas with each other. That's what makes research in programming languages so widely applicable," says Guha. As a student and a postdoc, Guha worked closely with researchers in security and computer networking. He anticipates many more such collaborations in the future, since both areas are great strengths of UMass Amherst.

Guha received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 2012. As part of his dissertation, he worked on JavaScript, the lingua franca of the Web. His JavaScript semantics, dubbed LambdaJS, is widely used by other researchers in programming languages and Web security. At UMass Amherst, he is looking forward to continuing research in Web security and tackling scripting languages more broadly.

During the 2012-2013 academic year, Guha was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Cornell University. At Cornell, he worked on Frenetic, which is a programming language for software-defined networking (SDN). Guha developed a new compiler and runtime system for Frenetic with a computer-verified proof of correctness. "Verification is tremendously important and fruitful, especially when applied to critical infrastructure, such as networks and the Web," says Guha.

"I truly admire the research conducted at UMass," says Guha. "And, I've found everyone at UMass to be very warm and welcoming. I feel lucky to join this wonderful community."