Michael Hicks is a Professor Emeritus (retired 2022) in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland. His research explores ways to make software more reliable and secure, oftentimes employing programming language-centric techniques, including domain-specific language design, type systems, program analysis, program transformation, and automated testing. He was the elected Chair of ACM SIGPLAN, the Association of Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, from 2015-2018. Topics of recent research include synergies between cryptography and programming languages; techniques for better random (fuzz) testing and probabilistic reasoning; and high-assurance tools and languages for quantum computing. For the last few years he has led efforts to use formal methods to develop proved-correct implementations of quantum programming tools, most notably including VOQC, the Verified Optimizer for Quantum Circuits. Michael Hicks was a QuICS Affiliate Fellow from 2021 to 2022. Hi is a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services.
