Dr. Philippa Gardner

Biography

Philippa Gardner is a professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and has been awarded a UK Research and Innovation Established Fellowship from 2018 to 2023. Her research focuses on program specification and verification, especially in the context of modern concurrent separation logics. She has contributed significantly to the development of logical abstraction and logical atomicity, working on the Gillian platform to build symbolic analysis tools for real-world programming languages like C and JavaScript. Her work integrates classical symbolic execution with semi-automatic verification based on separation logic and automatic compositional testing using bi-abduction techniques. Gardner completed her PhD thesis under the supervision of Professor Gordon Plotkin FRS at the University of Edinburgh in 1992 and held fellowships at Edinburgh for five years before moving to Cambridge in 1998 as an EPSRC Advanced Fellow, hosted by Professor Robin Milner FRS. She obtained a lectureship at Imperial in 2001 and became a professor in 2009. Additionally, she held a Microsoft Research Cambridge/Royal Academy Engineering Senior Fellowship at Imperial from 2005 to 2009. In 2020, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Philippa serves as the director of the Research Institute Verified Trustworthy Software Systems (VeTSS), supported by EPSRC and NCSC from 2017 to 2023. She is also the General Chair for POPL ‘24, the 50th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, which will be held in London in January 2024, and has organized a six-week summer programme titled 'Verified Software' at the Isaac Newton Institute in 2022.

Research Interests