Stephanie Balzer

Stephanie Balzer is an Assistant Professor in the Principles of Programming Group of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Her office is located in 9004 Gates-Hillman Center, and she can be reached at balzers@cs.cmu.edu with administrative support from Oliver Moss.

Dr. Balzer received her PhD from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Thomas R. Gross. Her academic trajectory shows consistent focus on formal methods and programming language theory from her early work on object relationships through to her current research on verification systems.

Her research program aims to enable the construction of failure-free software that is correct by design and secure to run. She deploys rigorous reasoning methods such as type systems and verification logics to formally prove adherence to desired properties. Her work emphasizes compositional methods for scalability and addresses verification needs arising from real-world problems. Dr. Balzer's interests span Programming Languages, Pure and Applied Logic, Software Verification, Type Theory, and Security. A driving force underlying her research is the belief that powerful solutions are fundamentally based on simple ideas that can be conveyed to and appreciated by non-experts.

Analysis of Dr. Balzer's publication record reveals a sustained focus on session types, logical relations, and concurrent systems verification. Her recent work shows increasing sophistication in handling timed protocols, information flow control, and heterogeneous applications. She consistently publishes in top-tier venues including POPL, PLDI, ICFP, and ECOOP, often receiving distinguished paper awards for particularly impactful contributions.

• NSF CAREER Award on "A Semantic Framework for Verifying Heterogeneous Applications" (2024)
• ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award (2023)
• ECOOP Distinguished Paper Award (2022)
• Supervised PhD student Jules Jacobs received Cum Laude distinction (2024)

Dr. Balzer has secured significant research funding including an NSF CAREER Award (2025), an NSF Award on Integrated Verification of IoT and Real-time Communication Protocols (2022), an AFOSR Award (2021), CyLab Seed Funding (2020), and previous NSF and Mozilla Research Grants. She actively mentors a diverse research group including PhD candidates Yue Yao, Yinsen (Tesla) Zhang, and Zak Kent (co-advised with Guy Blelloch), as well as M.S. and undergraduate researchers. Her supervision extends to postdoctoral fellows and thesis committee roles for other students.

Dr. Balzer leads research activities within CMU's ForML Lab and maintains active collaborations with researchers at ETH Zurich, Radboud University Nijmegen, and Cornell University. She plays significant leadership roles in the programming languages community including as founder of the PL Scholars Network, steering committee chair of the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (2023-2025), and co-organizer of the Oregon Programming Languages Summer School (2023).