Dr. Ben Titzer

Biography

Ben L. Titzer is a Principal Researcher in the Software and Societal Systems Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on systems, programming languages, compilers, virtual machines, and managed runtime systems, providing higher-level systems support. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 2007, and prior to that, he completed his M.S. in 2004 and B.S. in 2002 from the same institution. With over 15 years of experience in industrial research labs, Titzer previously worked at Google, where he contributed to internal exception monitoring tools and was a core member of the V8 team, which is the JavaScript engine powering Google Chrome. In 2014, he co-founded the WebAssembly project, fostering international collaboration among browser vendors to establish a new bytecode for the web. From 2015 to 2019, he led a managed team responsible for designing and implementing WebAssembly in Google’s V8. In 2020, he spent a year at the Australian National University, where he taught undergraduate courses on compilers as a Senior Lecturer and served as a Research Fellow.

Research Interests