Ruzica Piskac

Ruzica Piskac is a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University's School of Engineering & Applied Science, where she leads the Rigorous Software Engineering (ROSE) group. She joined Yale's Department of Computer Science in 2013 after serving as an Independent Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany.

Her educational background includes a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in 2011, where her dissertation won the Patrick Denantes Prize. Her advisor was Viktor Kuncak, and her thesis focused on Decision Procedures for Program Synthesis and Verification.

Piskac's research centers on improving software reliability and trustworthiness through formal techniques. Her primary interests span software verification, security and applied cryptography, automated reasoning, and code synthesis. She has developed innovative approaches in symbolic execution for Haskell, privacy-preserving formal methods, functional reactive synthesis, and verification for configuration files. Her work bridges theoretical foundations with practical applications in security, programming languages, and AI systems.

Her recent publications (2022-2024) demonstrate a strong focus on applying formal methods to emerging challenges in AI, legal reasoning, quantum computing security, and zero-knowledge proofs. There's a clear trend toward interdisciplinary work connecting formal verification with legal accountability, large language models, and security applications.

• Multiple Amazon Research Awards (2021-2023) for work on formalizing legal reasoning and automated reasoning
• Yale University's Ackerman Award for Teaching and Mentoring
• Facebook Communications and Networking Award
• Microsoft Research Award for the Software Engineering Innovation Foundation
• Donna L. Dubinsky Associate Professor of Computer Science (2019)
• Patrick Denantes Prize for her PhD dissertation

Piskac has graduated five PhD students, four of whom now hold assistant professor positions in computer science. Her research has been supported by multiple Amazon Research Awards and other funding sources. She has served as Program Chair of the 37th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification and on the Steering Committee of the Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design conference. Her ROSE group at Yale conducts cutting-edge research in formal methods with applications across software engineering, security, and AI systems.