Short Biography
Joël Ouaknine is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck
Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he
leads the Foundations of Algorithmic Verification group. He
also holds secondary appointments as Professor of Computer Science at
Saarland University and as Emmy Network Fellow at Keble College, Oxford.
His research interests straddle theoretical
computer science and mathematics, and lie mainly at the intersection
of dynamical systems and computation, making use of tools from number
theory, Diophantine geometry, algebraic geometry, and mathematical
logic. Other interests include the algorithmic analysis of real-time,
probabilistic, and infinite-state systems (e.g. model-checking
algorithms, synthesis problems, complexity), logic and applications to
verification, automated software analysis, and concurrency.
Prior to joining MPI-SWS, Joël worked as an academic in the
Computer Science Department at Oxford University from 2004 to 2016,
becoming Full Professor in 2010. He earned a BSc and MSc in
Mathematics from McGill University, and received his PhD in Computer
Science from Oxford in 2001. He held postdoc positions at Tulane
University and Carnegie Mellon University, and served twice as
visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan,
France. In both 2007 and 2008 he received an Outstanding Teaching
Award from Oxford University, and the following year he was awarded an
EPSRC Leadership Fellowship, enabling him to focus (almost)
exclusively on research for a period of five years. He is 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", and in 2015 was
awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to carry out research in dynamical
systems. He was elected member of Academia Europaea in 2020, and the
same year received the Arto Salomaa Prize (jointly with James Worrell),
for "outstanding contributions to Theoretical Computer
Science, in particular to the theory of timed automata and to the
analysis of dynamical systems". He was elected Fellow of the ACM
in 2021 for "contributions to algorithmic analysis of dynamical systems".
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