Emery D. Berger

Emery D. Berger is a Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system. He is also an Amazon Scholar at Annapurna Labs / Amazon Web Services. His work focuses on programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with particular emphasis on systems that improve software reliability, security, and performance.

Professor Berger received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. He has been a Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research and at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) / Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).

His research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance. Berger and his collaborators have created influential software systems including Hoard (a fast and scalable memory manager), DieHard (an error-avoiding memory manager), and DieHarder (a secure memory manager). He is also the creator and maintainer of CSrankings, a widely-used website that ranks computer science departments according to their research output.

Professor Berger's work has been recognized with numerous awards including a Microsoft Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and being named an ACM Fellow in 2019. His publications have received multiple Best Paper Awards at major conferences including FAST, OOPSLA, and SOSP, as well as five SIGPLAN Research Highlights and five CACM Research Highlights.

He has advised numerous PhD and Master's students who have gone on to successful careers in academia and industry, including positions at Williams College, Grinnell College, University of Buffalo, ByteDance, Stripe, Meta, and major tech companies like Google and Netflix. His current research group, the PLASMA lab, continues to develop innovative systems focused on performance, reliability, and security.