Nate Foster

Nate Foster is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and a Visiting Researcher at Jane Street. During the 2023-24 academic year, he served as a Visiting Professor at EPFL in the Data Center Systems Laboratory. His research bridges Programming Languages and Networking, focusing on formal verification, data plane programming, and language design for networked systems.

His recent work includes developing symbolic automata for network verification (e.g., Active Learning of Symbolic NetKAT Automata, StacKAT), creating efficient verifiers like KATch, and advancing type safety in data plane programming (e.g., SafeP4). These efforts span formal methods, algorithm optimization, and practical networked systems.

Notable scientific awards include:

• NSF CAREER Award
• Sloan Research Fellowship
• ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award
• ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Award

He actively contributes to PLDI, POPL, OOPSLA, and ICFP, serving as author, editor, and committee member. His GitHub repositories include tools for academic website templates and programming language research codebases.