Rohan Padhye

Rohan Padhye is an Assistant Professor in the Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D) within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He leads the Program Analysis, Software Testing, and Applications (PASTA) research group and serves as affiliate faculty at CyLab. His research spans software engineering, programming languages, systems, and security, with publications at top venues including ICSE, ASE, ISSTA, MSR, OOPSLA, SOSP, SoCC, NSDI, and USENIX Security.

Padhye completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley under Koushik Sen, where he investigated techniques for specializing program analysis and automated testing tools. He holds a Master's degree from IIT Bombay in static program analysis. Prior to CMU, he worked with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Research, Samsung Research America, and IBM Research India.

His research focuses on automatically discovering software bugs using dynamic program analysis and coverage-guided fuzz testing. Recent projects include Fray (a concurrency testing platform for the JVM), Mu2 (mutation-based fuzz testing), and JQF+Zest (coverage-guided property-based testing). His work has identified numerous bugs in open-source software across Google Closure Compiler, OpenJDK, Apache projects, and others.

Padhye's publications demonstrate a consistent focus on improving software testing through innovative fuzzing techniques, with recent work expanding into date/time bug analysis, distributed systems testing, and AI-driven legal reasoning. His research bridges theoretical foundations with practical applications, evidenced by tools like ChocoPy (used for teaching compilers at multiple universities) and JQF+Zest (integrated into Fuzzit cloud service).

• NSF grant as PI on Practical Controlled Concurrency Testing for Managed Code (2025)
• NSF grant as PI on Strengthening Correctness of Date and Time Logic in Software Systems (2025)
• Amazon Research Award for property-based testing (2025)
• Distinguished Reviewer Award for PLDI'25
• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for date/time bugs study
• Best Paper Award at SOSP 2019

Padhye advises multiple Ph.D. students in the PASTA Lab, including Ao Li, Vasudev Vikram, and Shrey Tiwari. He has served on program committees for major conferences including ASE, SPLASH, ISSTA, ICSE, and PLDI. His teaching at CMU includes courses on Program Analysis and Fantastic Bugs and How to Find Them, continuing his work from Berkeley where he was an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor.

The PASTA Lab conducts research on Program Analysis, Software Testing, and Applications with a focus on dynamic analysis and grey-box fuzzing. The lab follows an open science ethos, making all research artifacts openly accessible and reproducible under permissive licenses. Their research is funded by NSF, CyLab, and Amazon, with a commitment to responsible disclosure practices in security research.