Zachary Tatlock

Professor (photo)
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington

My goal is to help students become great computer scientists. In research, I work toward this goal with my students in the UW PLSE research group. In education, I work toward this goal by teaching courses on programming languages and related topics.

My expertise is rooted in formal verification, especially of compilers. As my students develop their own research vision, we branch out across diverse domains. Our work remains unified by themes of making it easier to write tricky code and figuring out how to ensure such programs are correct. We rigorously prove our results while building and measuring real systems1.

News

February 2026

🗣️  Visiting the PL and Graphics groups at Brown University to give a talk.

January 2026

🗣️  Participated in Dagstuhl Seminar 26022: EGRAPHS in January 2026. Dagstuhl News.

June 2025

🧰  PLDI 2025 was a huge success! Many thanks to everyone who helped me out as Program Chair!!

Please see past news for more.

Current Students

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Recent Service / Leadership

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Recent Publications

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Recent Teaching

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  1. My colleague Dan Grossman characterizes this combination of formalism and empiricism as “both Greek and graphs”.↩︎