About Me

Welcome to my home page (which is only slightly under construction, now). As an academic on paper, I go by the alias Alexander J. Summers, but in other capacities you can call me Alex.

In March 2020 I joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC) as an Associate Professor.

Prior to coming to UBC, I worked at ETH Zurich as a senior researcher (Deutsch: Oberassistent).

Research Interests

I work in the general area of program correctness, including designing new specification and verification logics and type systems, and developing automated tools for constructing proofs about heap-based and concurrent programs, usually built ultimately upon on SMT solvers. For several years before moving to UBC I co-ordinated the Viper Project (a project I still collaborate on with Peter Müller and many excellent members of his group at ETH Zurich) in which we develop a new intermediate verification language (Viper) and tool suite designed to ease the construction of new verification tools for modern reasoning techniques.

I recently started the Prusti Project, also in collaboration with ETH Zurich, in which we are building the first deductive verification tools for the Rust programming language. More information about my research can be found here.

Some personal (but not too personal) things can be found here, and if you need to contact me (feel free), my email address is alex dot summers at ubc dot ca

Applying to work with me

I currently have one or two positions available. I’m very happy to receive applications from excellent postdoc, Ph.D. and M.Sc. candidates interested in working with me; please send me an email but note the following: To be considered (and get a reply), your message must include details of your research interests and background, as well as some idea of how these connect with my own work. This is not meant to be unfriendly, but I receive a very large number of requests (multiple per day is normal), and most of these clearly do not come from applicants actually interested specifically in my work. Take a look at one or two papers, read what you can understand, feel free to ask questions and explain your interest. Although I’m pretty broad-minded about my research areas, emails which don’t have a clear connection with my work are very unlikely to get a response. UBC undergraduate students who are interested in potential internships and other projects they might get involved with are also very welcome to get in touch!

Current/Recent Programme Committees

Please consider submitting your excellent papers!