ERC Advanced Grant to Lars Birkedal
Congratulations to Professor and Villum Investigator Lars Birkedal, who has been awarded the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant for the research project CHORDS (Compositional Higher-Order Reasoning about Distributed Systems). The ERC Advanced Grant is one of the most competitive and highly regarded research grants in Europe, and it recognizes outstanding researchers who have demonstrated exceptional achievements in their field. The grant provides up to 2.5 million euros in funding for up to five years, allowing researchers to pursue groundbreaking, high-risk research projects.
Software systems are critical for the infrastructure of modern society, and software errors and security breaches pose enormous costs and risks. The traditional method of testing software systems is famously inadequate for guaranteeing the absence of errors and security breaches since not all execution paths are covered by testing. This is especially true for concurrent and distributed systems, where there are simply too many execution paths to test.
The CHORDS project will research and develop new theories, program logics, and methods for mathematically rigorous compositional reasoning about implementations of distributed systems and thus lay the foundation for tools that will help programmers make more correct and secure distributed systems.
Birkedal is one of the leading experts in programming languages, semantics, and logic. His work has had a significant impact on the field, and he has received many research grants and awards, including the Elite Researcher Award (2015) and the ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award (2013). The CHORDS project is an ambitious and innovative project that will build upon Birkedal’s current research on program verification for modern software systems. It is a testament to Birkedal's talent and expertise that he has been awarded the ERC Advanced Grant.
ERC grant recipients at the department:
- Lars Birkedal (2023, Advanced Grant)
- Anders Møller (2022, 2 x Proof of Concept Grant)
- Hans Gellersen (2020, Advanced Grant)
- Claudio Orlandi (2018, Starting Grant)
- Susanne Bødker (2016, Advanced Grant)
- Ivan Damgaard (2014, Advanced Grant)
- Jesper Buus (2011, Starting Grant)
- Anders Møller (2014, Consolidator Grant)
Full list of all ERC grant recipients at Aarhus University is available at https://www.au.dk/forskning/priserogbevillinger/ercgrants