Michael Vollmer

Michael Vollmer received a PhD in Computer Science from Indiana University in 2021, and became a Lecturer at the University of Kent in 2022. His research is on programming language design and implementation, with an emphasis on designing languages and compilers that allow for efficient, low-level programming without sacrificing safety. He is also a big proponent of functional programming, and often makes use of the programming languages Haskell and Racket in his research.

Michael Vollmer's research interests include programming language implementation, functional programming, types, and parallel programming. For his PhD he developed Gibbon, an experimental programming language and compiler built around the concept of programming with serialised data, where programs operate directly on data that has been serialised to disk or sent over a network without the need to parse it first. He has also done research on designing and implementing typed DSLs for GPU programming, as well as augmenting language runtimes to enforce a strong memory model for multithreaded programs.

He is co-I of the UKRI grant "Complementing Capabilities: Introducing Pointer-safe Programming to DSBD Tech" (with PI Prof. Mark Batty).

Michael primarily teaches modules relating to programming languages and software engineering.

He is currently looking to recruit potential PhD candidates. In particular, he is looking for students that are interested in programming language design and are familiar with typed functional programming languages like Haskell or OCaml.