Alastair Donaldson

Alastair Donaldson is a Professor and Director of Research in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, where he has been a faculty member since 2011. He leads the FastPL research group (formerly Multicore Programming Group), focusing on formal analysis, software testing, and programming languages techniques for improving software reliability, with special emphasis on high-performance systems.

Donaldson earned his BSc (First Class Honors) in Computing Science and Mathematics from the University of Glasgow in 2003, followed by a PhD in Computing Science from the same institution in 2007 under Alice Miller. His academic journey includes positions as an EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford, Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, and Research Engineer at Codeplay Software Ltd.

His research spans automated reasoning, compiler verification, and GPU programming with significant contributions to software reliability. He pioneered metamorphic testing for graphics drivers through GraphicsFuzz (acquired by Google in 2018) and developed innovative compiler fuzzing techniques. His work addresses critical challenges in memory models, concurrency, and verification of complex systems. Recent publications show increasing focus on applying these techniques to modern challenges including AI-generated code and verification-aware programming languages like Dafny.

Donaldson's scientific contributions have been recognized with the 2017 BCS Roger Needham Award, an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship, and multiple best paper awards including EuroSys 2024 (Best Paper), ICST 2024 (Best Industry Paper), and ISSTA 2023 (Distinguished Paper). His 2012 GPUVerify paper received the ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential OOPSLA Paper Award in 2022.

As an advisor, Donaldson has mentored numerous PhD students and postdocs, many now in prominent academic and industry positions. His research is supported by Amazon Research Awards (2022-2023) for Dafny ecosystem testing and compiler validation. He previously served as Senior Software Engineer and Visiting Researcher at Google following the GraphicsFuzz acquisition.

The FastPL group maintains strong industry connections with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, ensuring practical relevance of their theoretical work. Donaldson currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of ACM TOPLAS (2025-present) and on program committees for major conferences including PLDI, ICSE, and ASPLOS.