Ben Titzer

Ben L. Titzer is a principal researcher in the Software and Societal Systems Department. His research focuses on systems, systems programming languages, compilers, virtual machines, and managed runtime systems, as well as the higher-level systems they support.

After earning his Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA in 2007, Titzer spent nearly 15 years in industry and industrial research labs. During his time at Google, he worked on internal exception monitoring tools at scale, and was a core member of the V8 team (the JavaScript engine that powers Google Chrome). In 2014, Titzer co-founded the WebAssembly project, building an international collaboration among all browser vendors to develop and establish it as a new bytecode for the Web. From 2015 to 2019, he led and managed the team responsible for designing and implementing Wasm in Google’s V8. In 2020, Titzer spent nearly a year at Australian National University, teaching undergraduate compilers as a Senior Lecturer and serving as a Research Fellow.