The Ross & Muriel Cheriton Faculty Fellowship supports the work of a full-time faculty member in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science whose research is in the general areas of computer systems and computer networking.
The title of Faculty Fellow recognizes a faculty member whose scholarly work is widely known and respected internationally, who is an accomplished teacher at all levels, and who has displayed a high level of commitment and dedication to her or his School of Computer Science, the Faculty of Mathematics, and the University.
Current Ross & Muriel Cheriton Faculty Fellow
Ondřej Lhoták, 2026–2029
Professor Ondřej Lhoták is a leader in programming language theory and practice, with a particular focus on type systems and static program analysis for modern object-oriented and functional languages. His research addresses one of the key challenges in computer science: ensuring that software behaves correctly. As the pace at which code is written continues to accelerate, the ability to reason formally about what a program will do when it runs has never been more important. Professor Lhoták’s work builds the theoretical and practical foundations that make such reasoning possible, with the overarching goal of making software more reliable, expressive, and easier to reason about.
A central theme of Professor Lhoták’s work is strengthening the correspondence between programs and their behaviour: enabling programmers to express richer correctness properties in source code while developing analyses and type systems capable of verifying those properties automatically. His research combines rigorous mathematical foundations with full-scale implementations in practical languages and compilers. Professor Lhoták’s research has had direct impact on the Scala programming language, which is used in production at many companies and serves as an incubator for features later adopted in other languages such as Java, Kotlin, C#, and Python. In recent years, his group has become a leading contributor to the theoretical foundations of Scala’s type system, particularly through mechanized formalizations of the Dependent Object Types (DOT) calculus and its extensions.
Professor Lhoták’s research focuses on bridging the divide between functional and imperative programming. The most powerful techniques for reasoning about program behaviour apply cleanly to purely functional code, where computation has no side effects. Much real software, however, is written in imperative languages that modify mutable data, and this mutation undermines the guarantees that type systems can otherwise provide. Professor Lhoták’s research aims to create hybrid languages and reasoning techniques that allow code to be written functionally where possible and imperatively where necessary, while preserving formal correctness guarantees throughout.
Professor Lhoták publishes in and has served on the program committees of the top programming language research venues, including POPL, OOPSLA, ECOOP, PLDI, and TOPLAS. His publications received Distinguished Paper Awards at OOPSLA 2023 and POPL 2020 and multiple Distinguished Artifact Awards. His research was recognized by a Canadian Association of Computer Science Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award, two NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplements, a Marsland Faculty Fellowship, and an Ontario Early Researcher Award. Two of his former graduate students won the Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize, awarded annually to an outstanding early-career researcher in object-oriented programming.
An outstanding mentor and educator, Professor Lhoták is deeply committed to training the next generation of programming language researchers and software engineers. His students regularly publish at premier venues and have gone on to academic positions and industrial research roles at leading companies. He is known for designing and teaching CS 241E, an enriched second-year programming languages course that has inspired many undergraduate students to pursue programming languages research. His teaching excellence was recognized by a Faculty of Mathematics Award for Distinction in Teaching in 2024. Motivated by his own earlier participation, Professor Lhoták has contributed for many years to the contests run by the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing that inspire hundreds of thousands of high-school students each year, and to coaching University of Waterloo student teams in the International Collegiate Programming Contest.
Previous Ross & Muriel Cheriton Faculty Fellows
| Ross & Muriel Cheriton Faculty Fellow | Year |
|---|---|
| Shane McIntosh | 2023–26 |
| Mei Nagappan | 2020–23 |
| Shai Ben-David | 2017–20 |
| Anna Lubiw | 2014–17 |
| Therese Biedl | 2011–14 |
| Shai Ben-David | 2008–11 |
| Johnny Wong | 2005–08 |