I am a Professor and Director of Research in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London.
My research focuses on formal analysis, software testing and programming languages techniques for improving the reliability of software, with a special focus on software designed to run on high-performance systems. I lead the FastPL research group.
I am looking to recruit a PhD student to start in October 2025 to work on an exciting project on automated testing and verification for ML compilers and runtime systems. See here for details. The studentship is fully-funded but only covers UK home rate tuition fees; please check here to see whether you are eligible for home rate fees.
Candidates would need to have (or to be shortly awarded) a Distinction in a Masters (or equivalent) in Computer Science (or a related discipline).
Email me before 30th April if you are interested in applying!
My FastPL research group is interested in all things related to formal analysis, software testing and programming languages. For information about the group members and activities, see our group webpage.
Alastair Donaldson is a Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London where he is Director of Research and leads the FastPL Group, investigating novel techniques and tool support for programming, testing and reasoning about high performance systems and their programming languages. He was Founder and Director of GraphicsFuzz Ltd., a start-up company specialising in metamorphic testing of graphics drivers, which was acquired by Google in 2018, after which he spent time working with Google as a software engineering and then as a Visiting Researcher. He was the recipient of the 2017 BCS Roger Needham Award and an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship, and has published more than 100 articles in the fields of programming languages, formal verification, software testing and parallel programming. Alastair was previously a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, an EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Research Engineer at Codeplay Software Ltd. He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow, and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society.
I am married to Chris, who runs Little Wild Things. We have three children, Poppy, Felix and Kitty, two cats, Jekyll and Minty, and a dog, Caspar.
I currently teach:
Previous courses I have developed and taught include Symbolic Reasoning and Software Reliability.
alastair.donaldsonXimperial.ac.uk
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