Kathleen Fisher

Kathleen Fisher is the Director of the Information Innovation Office at DARPA and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Tufts University. She previously served as a full Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Tufts (2016–2021) and held roles as a Program Manager at DARPA (managing the HACMS and PPAML programs) and Principal Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Labs Research. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Education: PhD in Computer Science, Stanford University.

Research Interests: Kathleen’s work focuses on advancing programming languages theory and practice, with three core thrusts: (1) Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) (e.g., Hancock, PADS, Forest), (2) Program Synthesis (e.g., generating programs from specifications), and (3) Formal Methods for provably correct software (e.g., the DARPA HACMS program). Her research emphasizes collaboration and interdisciplinary applications in cybersecurity and data wrangling.

Publications: Her recent work spans DSL design, verified parsers, binary message format inference, and lens synthesis. Key trends include leveraging formal methods for security and advancing program synthesis techniques for practical systems.

Awards: ACM Fellow (2011), Hertz Foundation Fellow, SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award, and past leadership roles in SIGPLAN and the CRA-W Committee.

Advising & Grants: Advised PhD students (e.g., Matthew Ahrens), led DARPA-funded projects, and contributed to open-source tools like Hoopl and ANTLR. Her lab, the TuPL Group, focuses on programming language innovations and education.

Labs/Teams: Founded the Tufts Programming Languages (TUPL) research group and co-leads the Fisher Lab, advancing interdisciplinary applications of programming language techniques.