HCSS 2026 Program Committee

  P R O G R A M   C O - C H A I R S  

Darren CoferMIKE DODDS joined Galois in 2017 as a Principal Scientist. He specializes in applying formal methods to systems engineering problems in areas such as cryptography, distributed protocols, cyber-physical systems, and hardware semantics. Much of his work has focused on building tools that can be used by non-expert developers as part of their regular engineering workflow.

He has led a range of projects at Galois, including work on CN, a unified testing and verification tool for C code; Daedalus, a safe parsing language developed under the DARPA SafeDocs project; c2rust, a transpiler used by several popular Rust crates; and several verified cryptography projects using SAW and Cryptol, including a long-running collaboration with Amazon Web Services on core components of their AWS-LibCrypto library.

Mike received his PhD from the University of York, UK, in 2008, under the supervision of Dr. Detlef Plump. He then spent four years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, working with Dr. Matthew Parkinson and Prof. Peter Sewell. He returned to the University of York as a lecturer (in US terms, an associate professor) from 2012 to 2017, before joining Galois.

Sandeep Neema HeadshotSANDEEP NEEMA is a Professor with the Department of Computer Science, and Director of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, Vanderbilt University. He served a Program manager at DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) from July 2016 till September 2022. In his tenure at DARPA he conceived, developed, and managed influential programs at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Physical Systems, that included programs such as Assured Autonomy, Symbiotic Design of Cyber Physical Systems, and Assured Neurosymbolic Learning and Reasoning. His research interests include Cyber Physical Systems, Model-based Design Methodologies, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and Distributed Real-time Systems. Dr. Neema has authored and co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed conference, journal publications, and book chapters. 

Dr. Neema holds a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Vanderbilt University, and a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Utah State University. He earned a Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India.

 P R O G R A M   C O M M I T T E E  

PERRY ALEXANDER, The University of Kansas       
JUNE ANDRONICK, Proofcraft
DARREN COFER, Collins Aerospace        
KATHLEEN FISHER, DARPA
SHELLY FREITAS, NSA       
JOHN HATCLIFF, Kansas State University        
JOHN LAUNCHBURY, Galois, Inc.       
PATRICK LINCOLN, SRI International       
STEPHEN MAGILL, Sonatype       
 

BRAD MARTIN, Independent
LEE PIKE, Amazon Web Services        
RAY RICHARDS, Leidos     
KRISTIN YVONNE ROZIER, Iowa State University  
WILLIAM SCHERLIS, Carnegie Mellon University       
ERIC W. SMITH, Kestrel Institute    
 ADAM W, National Cyber Security Centre      
SEAN WEAVER, DARPA      
MATT WILDING, DARPA
 

  O R G A N I Z A T I O N

KATIE DEY, Vanderbilt University