Zachary Kincaid

Zachary Kincaid is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science. His research focuses on program analysis, logic, and programming languages, with an emphasis on making program analysis compositional and robust.

He received his PhD from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Azadeh Farzan. His work has been implemented in the Duet program analyzer, and he has an Erdős number of 3.

Dr. Kincaid's research interests include:

• Compositional program analysis techniques
• Algebraic approaches to program analysis
• Termination analysis and ranking function synthesis
• Verification of concurrent and parallel programs
• Automated reasoning and decision procedures
• Analysis of numerical programs and loops

His recent publications show a strong focus on developing novel techniques for program analysis that bridge theoretical computer science with practical verification tools, particularly in nonlinear analysis, quantified reasoning, and compositional verification.

Dr. Kincaid has received research support from ONR grant N00014-19-1-2318 for his work on robust program analysis.

He has advised graduate students including:

• Current: Jake Silverman, Nicolas Koh, Nikhil Pimpalkhare
• Graduated: Shaowei Zhu (PhD 2024, Researcher at Amazon), Charlie Murphy (PhD 2023, Postdoc at University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Dr. Kincaid teaches courses including:

• COS 320 – Compiling Techniques (Spring 2024, 2022, 2020, 2019)
• COS 516 / ELE 516 – Automated Reasoning about Software (Fall 2025, 2022, 2018)
• COS 217 – Introduction to Programming Systems (Fall 2024)
• COS IW – Practical Solutions to Intractable Problems (Fall 2023, Spring 2023, 2018, 2017)
• COS IW – Little Languages (Spring 2018)
• COS 597D – Reasoning about concurrent systems (Fall 2016)