Aaron Bembenek
Computer scientist ✺ reader of books ✺ fisher of fish
I am a computer science postdoc at The University of Melbourne supervised by Toby Murray. I work in the areas of programming languages and automated formal methods, with a current focus on automatically proving security properties about binary code. I am getting increasingly interested in neurosymbolic reasoning (see my initial work on Neurosymbolic Transition Systems).
I earned a PhD in computer science at Harvard University, where I was advised by Stephen Chong and was a member of the programming languages group. My PhD research focused on combining logic programming and constraint solving, with applications to program analysis and synthesis; this included designing and implementing the logic programming language Formulog, a variant of Datalog for implementing SMT-based program analysis.
I have an undergraduate degree in classics from Princeton University. I enjoy reading and spending time outdoors.
Selected Honors
- McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship (The University of Melbourne’s flagship postdoc fellowship, starting mid-2026)
- Annual school-wide award for “Excellence in Research (Early Career)” (School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, 2025)
- Distinguished Artifact (OOPSLA 2024)
- Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS 2019)