Donald Pinckney

(he/him)

PhD Student

  • Programming Languages
  • Formal Methods
  • Systems
  • Security
  • Software Engineering
  • MS in Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • BS in Computer Science and Engineering, University of California Davis
  • BS in Mathematics, University of California Davis

Donald Pinckney is a doctoral student at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, advised by Arjun Guha. His doctoral research, which he began in 2018 and expects to complete in 2024, focuses on programming languages and software engineering.

Pinckney aims to address challenges faced by modern programmers, and to provide formal guarantees of program properties in a way that advances real-world applications. He has worked to define formal semantics of serverless computing, provide primitives in WebAssembly for first-class control, and develop automated optimization of dependency resolution in large-scale package ecosystems. The end goal: an easier path to creating correct, secure software.

During his undergraduate years, Pinckney interned with Apple twice—where he worked on the AppKit user interface library for macOS—and FileMaker once. He was previously a doctoral student at UMass Amherst and a member of their PLASMA Lab, and is now a member of Khoury College’s Programming Research Laboratory. Pinckney has also presented papers on delimited continuations for WebAssembly at DLS 2020 and on serverless computing at OOPSLA 2019, winning the Distinguished Paper Award for the latter.

Pinckney dabbles in machine learning, abstract algebra, and topology outside of his core research interests, and practices music, archery, and several martial arts outside of academia.