Philippa Gardner

Philippa Gardner is a Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, holding a UK Research and Innovation Established Career Fellowship (2018–2023). She leads the Research Institute on Verified Trustworthy Software Systems (VeTSS, 2017–2023) and is renowned for her work on program specification and verification, particularly in concurrent separation logics and the development of the Gillian platform for symbolic analysis of real-world languages like C and JavaScript.

• PhD from the University of Edinburgh (1992), supervised by Professor Gordon Plotkin FRS.
• EPSRC Advanced Fellowship at Cambridge (1998), followed by a lectureship at Imperial (2001) and promotion to Professor (2009).

Her research bridges program verification, symbolic execution, and bi-abduction, focusing on robust mechanised language specifications. She has pioneered library specifications for JavaScript and WebAssembly, emphasizing environment robustness and scalable compositional reasoning. The Gillian platform unifies classical symbolic execution, separation-logic verification, and bi-abduction-based testing.

Philippa has received prestigious awards, including the Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship (2020), President and Rector’s Award for Teaching (2013), and Microsoft Research — Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Fellowship (2005–2009). She has secured significant grants from Amazon, Facebook, EPSRC, and GCHQ for projects like Gillian and JSVerify.

She actively supervises PhD students and teaches the Scalable Software Verification course. As General Chair of POPL ’24 and organizer of the Isaac Newton Institute’s Verified Software program (2022), she shapes academic discourse. Her editorial roles and conference committee memberships further underscore her influence in programming languages and formal methods.