Campus Directory

Division Baskin School of Engineering

Department/ College/ Unit Computer Science and Engineering

Title Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Computer Science
Software Engineering
Computer and Network Security
Programming

Web Site

Primary Office Location Engineering Building 2
367

Mail Stop Engineering

Biography, Education and Training

Cormac Flanagan is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. His research in programming languages and software engineering develops tools and techniques for building reliable software, including verification of concurrent programs, dynamic information flow security, data race detection, and reproducible computational notebooks.

He is a Fellow of the ACM, a member of the inaugural class of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy, and a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship. His papers have received three Most Influential Paper Awards (two at PLDI, one at POPL), Distinguished Paper Awards at ECOOP, CSF, and ISSTA, and an ECOOP Best Paper Award.

Before joining UCSC in 2003, he was a Principal Research Scientist at Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq, and Hewlett-Packard. He received a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathematics from University College Dublin in 1990, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Rice University in 1995 and 1997. He holds six U.S. patents and has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers. His research has been supported by the NSF, DoD, Microsoft, IBM, UC, and others.

Summary of Expertise

Programming languages and software engineering, with expertise in program verification, concurrent programming (data race detection, atomicity, thread interference), information flow security, type systems, static and dynamic program analysis, and reproducibility of computational notebooks.

Research Interests

• Programming languages
• Software engineering
• Program verification
• Concurrency
• Computer security and information flow control
• Static and dynamic program analysis
• Type systems
• Reproducible computational science

Teaching Interests

• Programming languages (graduate and undergraduate)
• Software engineering and software methodology
• Introductory programming
• Graduate seminars on program verification, concurrency, and security

Awards, Honors and Grants

Honors

• Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Inaugural class, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy (2026)
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship
• UCSC Excellence in Teaching Award

Paper awards

• POPL Most Influential Paper Award, for "Multiple Facets for Dynamic Information Flow" (POPL 2012)
• PLDI Most Influential Paper Award, for "FastTrack: Efficient and Precise Dynamic Race Detection" (PLDI 2009)
• PLDI Most Influential Paper Award, for "Extended Static Checking for Java" (PLDI 2002)
• ECOOP Distinguished Paper Award (2024), CSF Distinguished Paper Award (2020), ISSTA Distinguished Paper Award (2004)
• ECOOP Best Paper Award (2013)
• PLDI Distinguished Artifact Award (2017)
• TCS Top Cited Article Award, 2005–2010

NSF grants

• Keystone: Modular Concurrent Software Verification (2023–2026)
• Repeto: Building a Network for Practical Reproducibility in Experimental Computer Science (co-PI, 2022–2026)
• Synchronicity: Synthesizing Concurrent Software from Sequential and Cooperative Specifications (2018–2021)
• Fast and Precise Dynamic Race Detection (2014–2018)
• DeCoP: Deterministic Cooperative Parallelism (co-PI, 2013–2018)
• Static and Dynamic Analysis for Cooperative Concurrency (2011–2015)
• Next-Generation Infrastructure for Trustworthy Web Applications (2009–2012)
• A JML Community Infrastructure (2007–2010)
• Checking Atomicity for Improved Multithreaded Software Reliability (2003–2008)