I am a PhD student at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and Saarland University under the supervision of Derek Dreyer, head of the Foundations of Programming group.
+I am a post-doctoral researcher in the PDOS group at MIT CSAIL under the supervision of Frans Kaashoek and Nickolai Zeldovich.
+Previously, I completed my PhD at MPI-SWS and Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany; my advisor was Derek Dreyer.
Previously, I did my Bachelor's thesis in computer science at the Compiler Design chair of the university (also see below).
+I will start my position as assistant professor at ETH Zürich on November 1st. +If you are interested in doing a PhD or post-doc working on programming language foundations, and in particular formal foundations for Rust, or if you are an ETH student interested in a Master Thesis in that area -- please [reach out](https://research.ralfj.de/contact.html)!
-I am currently working on giving a formal model to Rust's type system.
-This work is part of the RustBelt project.
-The Rust work builds on my previous work on a logic to support modular reasoning about higher-order concurrent imperative programs. The focus there was on providing simple building blocks that are powerful enough to recover more sophisticated reasoning techniques that were often axiomatized in previous logics.
-For some more information, check out my research blog.
My two main lines of work are about Rust and Iris.
+On the Rust side, I am working (also in collaboration with the Rust language team) towards a solid formal foundation for the language, including in particular the unsafe parts.
+One key result here is our type safety proof, which also describes a methodology for establishing type safety of well-encapsulated unsafe code.
+My goal is to make unsafe Rust just as safe as safe Rust by means of formal verification.
+On the Iris side, besides continuing development of its logical foundations, I am interested in applying Iris to new problem domains; recently I started working on modular verification of fault-tolerant distributed system components.
+For some more information, check out my research blog, my CV, and my research statement.
In my free time, I like to run internet services myself and work on free software. This goes hand-in-hand with my pursuit of defending our privacy rights and our freedom in the digital world.