Aaron Bembenek

Computer scientist ✺ reader of books ✺ fisher of fish

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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.

I have an undergraduate degree in classics from Princeton University. I enjoy reading and spending time outdoors.

Teaching

  • Marker, master’s theses (The University of Melbourne, 2023–2025)
  • Co-instructor, CSC 600: Programming Paradigms and Languages (San Francisco State University, 2022)
  • Co-organizer, CS 252r: Verified Compilation (Harvard University, 2020)
  • Teaching Fellow, CS 153: Compilers (Harvard University, 2018)
  • Teaching Fellow, CS 152: Programming Languages (Harvard University, 2016)

Service

  • Program Committee, International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL 2026)
  • Review Committee, ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2026)
  • Steering Committee, Australian Institute of Learning and Reasoning Systems (AILARS) (2025–present)
  • Reviewer, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR 2025)
  • Review Committee, ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2025)
  • Program Committee, European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025)
  • Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE 2023, 2024)
  • Sub-reviewer, International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming (FLOPS 2022)

Honors and awards