Emery Berger

Emery Berger is a professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), where he co-leads the PLASMA lab. He is also a frequent visiting scientist at Microsoft Research and at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC)/Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), and is currently serving as Amazon Scholar with Amazon Web Services.

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.

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. Berger served two terms 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 served as the co-program chair for ASPLOS 2021. In addition, he developed and maintains the widely used CSrankings website. Berger was named an ACM Fellow in 2019.