Emery D. Berger

Interests

Programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance.

Research

Professor Berger's research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance. He is the creator of a number of influential software systems including Hoard, a fast and scalable memory manager that accelerates multithreaded applications (used by companies including British Telecom, Cisco, Credit Suisse, Reuters, Royal Bank of Canada, SAP, and Tata, and on which the Mac OS X memory manager is based); DieHard, an error-avoiding memory manager that directly influenced the design of the Windows 7 Fault-Tolerant Heap; and DieHarder, a secure memory manager that was an inspiration for hardening changes made to the Windows 8 heap.

Biography

Emery Berger is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system, where he co-leads the PLASMA lab. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Professor Berger is also a frequent Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research and at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) / Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)

Activities & Awards

Professor Berger's honors include a Microsoft Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Lilly Teaching Fellowship, Most Influential Paper Awards from ASPLOS, OOPSLA, and PLDI, and five papers selected as CACM Research Highlights. Professor Berger currently is serving in his second term as an elected member-at-large of the SIGPLAN Executive Committee. He spent a decade as Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, served as Program Chair for PLDI 2016 and is currently serving as co-Program Chair for ASPLOS 2021. In addition, he developed and maintains the widely-used CSrankings website. Professor Berger was named an ACM Fellow in 2019.