On Wednesday 15 January 2025 I’ll be defending my dissertation titled “Declarative Name Binding for Type System Specifications”. The defense starts at 17:00 CET and can be followed online (livestream: https://nmclive.tudelft.nl/mediasite/play/e5b66c56929044a792325e3eec3f04a31d).

A Dutch PhD defence is a very formal public ceremony. After a short presentation to introduce the dissertation topic to the audience, there is an hour of questioning by the committee members, until the bedel announces hora est (it is time). If the degree is awarded, the diploma ceremony immediately follows the defence.

The topic of the dissertation is the design of a meta-language, Statix, to support high-level type specifications of programming languages with expressive name binding features, and automatically generate type checkers from those specifications. The dissertation is accompanied by a number of propositions that reflect on the research more generally or comment on societal issues. Follow this link to download the dissertation and propositions: https://doi.org/10.4233/uuid:4bf44aa1-779c-4a96-8c55-5e1b54e16119.