Dawson R. Engler is an American computer scientist. He is an associate professor in the fields of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University.

Career

After graduating from the University of Arizona, Engler earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. During his studies, he worked with Frans Kaashoek in a research group at MIT called CSAIL that studied parallel and distributed operating systems. His graduate research focused on a type of computer system called the exokernel.

Engler is now an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. In 2002, he helped start a company called Coverity with several of his students. The company aimed to turn their research on static code analysis for finding errors in computer programs into a business.

Awards and honors

Engler and his co-authors won the Best Paper award at USENIX's OSDI conferences in 2000, 2004, and 2008. He shared the 2018 SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award with his students, Cristian Cadar and Daniel Dunbar, for their work presented at the 2008 conference.

Engler received the 2006 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award for his research on operating systems. In 2008, he was honored with the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his important contributions to automated program checking and bug-finding.

Selected publications

• Cadar, C.; Dunbar, D.; Engler, D. (December 8, 2008). "Klee: Unassisted and automatic generation of high-coverage tests for complex systems programs." Published in the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 2008: 209–224.
• Engler, D. R.; Kaashoek, M. F.; O'Toole, J. (1995). "Exokernel." Published in the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, SOSP '95: 251–266. doi: 10.1145/224056.224076. ISBN 0897917154. S2CID 221932539.
• Cadar, Cristian; Ganesh, Vijay; Pawlowski, Peter M.; Dill, David L.; Engler, Dawson R. (2006). "EXE: Automatically generating inputs of death." Published in the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security: 322–335. doi: 10.1145/1180405.1180445. ISBN 1595935185. S2CID 209393318.
• Engler, Dawson; Ashcraft, Ken (December 2003). "RacerX: effective, static detection of race conditions and deadlocks." Published in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 37(5): 237–252. doi: 10.1145/1165389.945468.
• Engler, Dawson; Chen, David Yu; Hallem, Seth; Chou, Andy; Chelf, Benjamin (December 2001). "Bugs as deviant behavior: a general approach to inferring errors in systems code." Published in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 35(5): 57–72. doi: 10.1145/502059.502041.