Dawson Engler


Dawson R. Engler is an American computer scientist and an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.
After graduating from Arizona State University, Engler earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998 while working with Frans Kaashoek in the MIT CSAIL Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group. His graduate thesis discussed the exokernel operating system kernel. He is also a former bodybuilder. He began lifting weights at fourteen years old, and won an amateur bodybuilding competition in the 1980s.
In 2000, 2004, and 2008, Engler was awarded the Best Paper award by the Operating Systems Design and Implementation conference sponsored by USENIX. In 2005, he helped to develop and publish EXE, a bug-finding tool based on concolic testing. In 2006, he was awarded the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award for his work in operating systems research. In 2008, he was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work in introducing and developing tools and techniques that automate program checking to identify errors in software systems.