Jon Howell

Jon Howell serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and is a researcher at VMware Research (now part of Broadcom) in Bellevue, Washington. His primary work centers on advancing systems verification to make it a practical development process for high-value systems through industry-academia collaboration.

Education:

• Ph.D. from Dartmouth College under David Kotz, focusing on distributed naming/security and SPKI-based authorization across administrative boundaries

Research Interests: Howell pioneers systems verification at scale, driving innovations in heap reasoning, concurrency, and debugging through real-world storage system development. His work includes the Verus verification language, Ironclad Apps (verified single-node security applications), IronFleet (verified distributed systems), and the Embassies security model. He bridges formal methods with practical systems engineering across distributed computing and high-performance storage domains.

Scientific Awards:

• 2012 Minute Sort record holder for Flat Datacenter Storage

Professional Experience: Prior VMware roles include Google (until 2018, Slicer sharding project) and Microsoft Research (pre-2015), where he developed MapCruncher (shipped by Microsoft), Asirra, InkblotPasswords, and Farsite distributed filesystem. He co-instructed UW's CSE 552 (2019) and taught two verification summer schools that deployed protocol verification in VMware teams. His industry experience directly informs academic methodology development.

Personal: An airplane pilot, cyclist, puzzlehunt enthusiast, and builder of a rocketship treehouse.