Aurojit Panda Wins SIGPLAN's Most Influential Paper Award

June 25, 2026

Aurojit Panda, Assosciate Professor of Computer Science, has received the Most Influential PLDI Paper Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN). The award is given annually to the authors of a paper presented at the Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation 10 years prior. Professor Panda and his co-authors—Oded Padon, Kenneth Lauchlin McMillan, Mooly Sagiv, Sharon Shoham—are recognized for their 2016 paper "Ivy: Safety Verification by Interactive Generalization."

"Ivy and its descendants enabled the first formal proofs of multiple Paxos variants, formal testing of QUIC implementations that uncovered dozens of bugs including an information leak comparable to Heartbleed, and the first mechanized safety and liveness proof of the deployed Stellar blockchain consensus protocol," the SIGPLAN prize citation reads. "A decade later, this decidable verification paradigm continues to grow in influence, shaping tools including Verus, mypyvy, and Veil, and finding application in industrial hardware verification."

Professor Panda joined Courant's faculty in 2018. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley under the advisement of Scott Shenker and worked as a developer at Nefeli Networks. Professor Panda works on systems and networking problems. He is particularly interested in approaches to improve system reliability, either by identifying bugs before deployment or by improving fault tolerance.