Lauren Pick

Lauren Pick is a computer scientist who develops automated techniques for verifying and synthesizing programs, with recent interest in applying them to LLM interpretability. She completed a Ph.D. at Princeton in 2022, supported in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and as a 2021 Computing Innovation Fellow she spent 2022 to 2024 as a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with Berkeley and Wisconsin–Madison. She coauthored AutoWS-Bench-101 on automated weak supervision at NeurIPS in 2022, the Psym and QUESO papers at PLDI in 2023, and the Troubadour database checker at OOPSLA in 2025. She is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Now at: Chinese University of Hong Kong

Timeline

2018

NSF fellowship and relational verification

In 2018, she receives an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and publishes the CAV paper "Exploiting Synchrony and Symmetry in Relational Verification" with Grigory Fedyukovich and Aarti Gupta. Her Princeton general exam, with Gupta as advisor, carries the same title.
2020–2021

Verifying secure information flow

With Grigory Fedyukovich and Aarti Gupta, she publishes "Automating Modular Verification of Secure Information Flow" at FMCAD in 2020 and "Unbounded Procedure Summaries from Bounded Environments" at VMCAI in 2021.
2021

A Computing Innovation Fellowship

The Computing Research Association lists her among the 2021 Computing Innovation Fellows, with Princeton as her primary affiliation, the University of Wisconsin–Madison as host institution and Aws Albarghouthi as mentor.
2022–2024

Princeton Ph.D., then a postdoc

She receives her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2022. From 2022 to 2024, she is a Computing Innovation postdoctoral fellow, affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
2022

Weak supervision and qubit routing

In 2022, she is a coauthor of AutoWS-Bench-101, a framework for evaluating automated weak supervision with 100 labels, at NeurIPS, and of "Qubit Mapping and Routing via MaxSAT" at MICRO.
2023

Psym and QUESO at PLDI

At PLDI in 2023, she coauthors Psym, a symbolic explorer for distributed systems, with Ankush Desai and Aarti Gupta, and QUESO, which synthesizes quantum-circuit optimizers, with Amanda Xu, Abtin Molavi, Swamit Tannu and Aws Albarghouthi. QUESO builds an optimizer for IBM computers in 1.2 minutes.
2025

Troubadour for database checking

In 2025, she coauthors "Checking Observational Correctness of Database Systems" at OOPSLA with Amanda Xu, Ankush Desai, Sanjit A. Seshia and Aws Albarghouthi. Their Troubadour tool queries a Satisfiability Modulo Theories solver and helps detect two new bugs in a database system under development at a large tech company.
As of October 2026

Assistant professor at CUHK

She is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she works on automated techniques for formally reasoning about programs. Her recent interests include applying static analysis and synthesis to LLM interpretability, and she sits on the OOPSLA review committee for SPLASH 2026.