Students
I advise bachelor’s and master’s students at CISPA, and before that I worked with students at Northeastern. If you are a student at Saarland University or CISPA and want to do a thesis on testing, program analysis, or software supply chain security, get in touch.
Current students (CISPA)
| Student | Project | Type | Started |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan Dajnec | Language-based testing for low-level languages (WASM, assembly) | Bachelor’s thesis | Fall 2026 |
| Niklas Buhl | Language-based testing with example programs, applied to the Kotlin compiler | Bachelor’s thesis | Fall 2026 |
| Aadrish Mahmood | Generating test programs for static analyses from CodeQL queries | Research assistant | Fall 2026 |
| Jashmanpreet | When should a tool use an LLM? Swapping LLM agents into classical analysis tools | Bachelor’s thesis | Fall 2026 |
| Maik Ruder | Minimizing bundler configurations that cause mis-bundles | Bachelor’s thesis | Fall 2026 |
| Lars Schirra | Generating executable programs for compiler testing | Bachelor’s thesis | Summer 2026 |
| Badr Ghouiri | Reconstructing React single-page applications from their bundles | Bachelor’s thesis | Summer 2026 |
Past students (CISPA)
| Student | Project | Type | Year | Now |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Davide Bombelli | Compatibility across language implementations | Master’s thesis | 2026 | PhD student, CISPA |
| Kevin George Leo | Inconsistencies across JavaScript runtimes | Master’s thesis | 2026 | |
| Neev Nirav Mehta | Grammar repair; STAT-LINT (ASE’25) | Master’s thesis | 2026 | Working at CISPA |
| Mini Mariya Thomas | Language-based performance testing | Master’s thesis | 2026 | |
| Sara-Elena Vatavu | Fuzzing font hinting for malicious glyph substitution | Collaboration | 2026 | PhD student, CISPA |
| Zheyuan Wu | Mining hints from the system under test to extend input grammars; also checking statistical assumptions (FSE’25, Distinguished Paper) | Bachelor’s thesis | 2025 | PhD student, Brown |
| Stanimir Iglev | Metamorphic and differential language-based testing | Master’s thesis | 2025 | InputLab |
| Wenyuan Xu | D-BUNDLR (ICSE’26) | Research internship | 2025 | Postdoc, Aarhus |
| Badr Ghouiri | Bugs in JavaScript bundlers | CySec project | 2025 | Master’s, CISPA |
| Maik Ruder | Choosing bundler configurations | CySec project | 2025 |
PhD students I work with (CISPA)
I am not their official advisor, but we work together closely.
- Laura Plein: grammar repair, performance testing, and learning specifications for private data
- Masudul Hasan Masud Bhuiyan: boundary testing of regular expressions
- Abdullah AlHamdan: differential testing of JavaScript runtimes and regex engines
Northeastern
- Satyajit Gokhale: automatic migration from synchronous to asynchronous JavaScript (OOPSLA’22); started as a master’s student, then did his PhD with Frank Tip. Now an applied scientist at AWS.
- Mark W. Aldrich: DrAsync (ICSE’22, Best Artifact) and Augur (ASE’22). Now a PhD student at Tufts.
- Matthew Blanco: Augur (ASE’22).
- Dale Xu: React re-rendering (ICSE’26, Distinguished Paper).