Cristian Cadar

Cristian Cadar is a Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, leading the Software Reliability Group. His research focuses on improving software reliability and security through practical techniques in software engineering, computer systems, and program analysis.

• Education:
  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, Stanford University
  • M.Eng. in Computer Science, MIT
  • B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, MIT

His research interests center on software engineering and software security, particularly symbolic execution, dynamic symbolic execution (DSE), and multi-version execution. Current work explores techniques for scalability, constraint solving, and runtime security in software systems.

Key trends in his recent articles include optimizing symbolic execution for testing, addressing path explosion in constraint-based test generation, and advancing multi-version execution for dynamic software updates. His publications also cover program analysis, automated testing, and formal methods for software reliability.

Awarded prestigious honors such as the Humboldt Research Award (2024), ERC Consolidator Grant (2018), and IEEE New Directions Award (2022). Other accolades include the BCS Roger Needham Award (2019) and SIGOPS Hall of Fame (2018).

Cadar supervises PhD and postdoctoral researchers in software reliability and security. His group has secured grants from the ERC and EPSRC, including a Consolidator Grant (2018) and Early-Career Fellowship (2013). He actively contributes to conference organizing committees and editorial boards.

The Software Reliability Group at Imperial College, led by Cadar, specializes in techniques like KLEE and EXE for automated testing. Their work has been adopted by industry partners such as Fujitsu, IBM, and Microsoft, particularly in runtime security tools like WIT.