Peter W. O'Hearn

Peter W. O'Hearn is a Professor of Computer Science at University College London and a Research Scientist at Meta AI (FAIR). He has held academic positions at Syracuse University, Queen Mary University of London, and University College London, before joining Facebook (now Meta) in 2013 as part of the acquisition of the verification startup Monoidics. His career spans over 25 years of research in programming languages and logic, with significant contributions to both theoretical foundations and practical industrial applications.

O'Hearn's research primarily focuses on formal reasoning about programs, with his most notable contributions being the co-invention (with John Reynolds) of Separation Logic and the development of Incorrectness Logic. His work bridges the gap between theoretical computer science and practical software engineering, emphasizing how fundamental theory, tool development, and real-world application can mutually reinforce each other. He has consistently advocated for the integration of formal methods into industrial software development practices.

His research has led to the development of the Infer program analyzer, which runs internally on Meta's code bases and has detected over 100,000 bugs that have been fixed by developers. Infer is also used in production at other major companies including Amazon, Mozilla, Spotify, and Marks and Spencer. His recent work on Incorrectness Logic represents a paradigm shift from traditional program verification approaches, focusing on bug finding rather than correctness proving.

O'Hearn has received numerous prestigious awards recognizing both his theoretical contributions and practical impact:

• Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 2018)
• Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2016)
• 2016 Gödel Prize
• 2016 CAV Award
• Two POPL MIP awards
• Honorary doctorate from Dalhousie University (2018)
• 2021 IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice

Throughout his career, O'Hearn has successfully translated theoretical advances into practical tools used at scale in industry. His work on Separation Logic led directly to Infer, while his more recent work on Incorrectness Logic aims to provide foundations for next-generation bug catching tools. He has maintained a strong academic presence while working in industry, continuing his professorship at UCL alongside his role at Meta.

O'Hearn leads research efforts at the intersection of formal methods and practical software engineering at Meta, focusing on scaling static analysis techniques to handle the massive codebases typical of modern technology companies. His work has significantly influenced how large tech companies approach software verification and bug detection.