PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Nada Amin

Nada Amin is a Harvard computer scientist who combines programming languages with artificial intelligence to build systems that are correct by construction. After studying at MIT and working on Gmail's compiler infrastructure at Google, she did her doctoral work at EPFL, where she was part of the team behind Scala and wrote a thesis on Dependent Object Types. At Cambridge she was a University Lecturer in Programming Languages, and in 2018 she and Tiark Rompf published "Collapsing Towers of Interpreters" at POPL. She joined Harvard SEAS in 2019, and in 2024 she, Gabriel Poesia and Chloe Loughridge described dafny-annotator, a tool that pairs language models with the Dafny verifier. She is an associate professor of computer science at Harvard SEAS and, since July 2026, associate faculty at the Kempner Institute.

Now at
Harvard University and Midspiral
Works
83
Citations
52,603
h-index
17
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2001–2008

    Computer science at MIT

    She studies computer science at MIT from 2001, earning a bachelor of science with a music minor in May 2008 and a master of engineering in December 2008 with a thesis on computer-aided design for multilayer microfluidic chips. In 2001 and 2002, she researches computational biology in Trey Ideker's lab at the Whitehead Institute. Her work appears in the 2003 Genome Research paper on Cytoscape, a software environment for biomolecular interaction networks.

  2. 2009–2011

    Gmail compiler work at Google

    She works as a software engineer at Google in Zürich from 2009 to 2011, on the compiler infrastructure supporting Gmail and Google Apps.

  3. 2011–2017

    Dependent Object Types at EPFL

    She joins Martin Odersky's Programming Methods Laboratory at EPFL in 2011 as a doctoral assistant and becomes a member of the team behind Scala. Her thesis is titled Dependent Object Types, a sound foundation for languages like Scala, and she stays on as a postdoctoral researcher until 2017. In November 2016, she and Ross Tate publish "Java and Scala's Type Systems are Unsound: The Existential Crisis of Null Pointers" at OOPSLA, which identifies a serious bug in the core of the Java language.

  4. 2017–2019

    Lecturer at Cambridge

    She becomes a University Lecturer in Programming Languages in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge in 2017, and a Fellow of Jesus College. She teaches metaprogramming, advanced functional programming and semantics of programming languages.

  5. January 2018

    Collapsing towers of interpreters

    With Tiark Rompf, she presents "Collapsing Towers of Interpreters" at POPL in January 2018. The paper uses staging and stage polymorphism to collapse a tower of interpreters into a compiler that removes interpretive overhead and runs in a single pass.

  6. 2019

    Joining Harvard SEAS

    Harvard SEAS announces in January 2019 that she will join its Computer Science faculty in Fall 2019, coming from Cambridge. Her work at Cambridge focuses on generative programming, which she describes as writing programs that write programs. At Harvard, her research combines machine learning and programming languages to create neuro-symbolic systems.

  7. 2024–2026

    Language models meet Dafny

    In November 2024, she, Gabriel Poesia and Chloe Loughridge describe dafny-annotator, a tool that combines large language models and search to add logical annotations to Dafny methods until the verifier can prove them correct. Fine-tuning on DafnyBench and the synthetic dataset DafnySynth raises LLaMa 8B's success rate to 50.6%, up from 15.7% with greedy search. In 2026, she receives a Kempner Accelerator Award for her team's work on DafnySynth, a computational model that writes, proves and repairs software under strict mathematical constraints.

  8. As of October 2026

    Kempner associate faculty

    In July 2026, she begins a three-year appointment as associate faculty at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard. She is an associate professor of computer science at Harvard SEAS and co-founds Midspiral to bring verification to mainstream AI-assisted software development.

Career

  1. Since 2019Harvard UniversityAssociate professor of computer science, Associate faculty
  2. NowMidspiralCo-founder
  3. 2017–2019University of CambridgeUniversity Lecturer in Programming Languages
  4. 2011–2017EPFLDoctoral assistant, Postdoctoral researcher
  5. 2009–2011GoogleSoftware engineer
  6. 2001–2002Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyResearcher

Education

  1. From 2011EPFLPhD
  2. 2008Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Science and Master of Engineering

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Cytoscape: A Software Environment for Integrated Models of Biomolecular Interaction Networks2003 · Genome Research · 51,698 citationsWith Daniel Ramage
  2. Optimizing data structures in high-level programs2013 · ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) · 93 citationsWith Kunle Olukotun
  3. The Essence of Dependent Object Types2016 · Lecture notes in computer science · 71 citations
  4. Computer-aided design for microfluidic chips based on multilayer soft lithography2009 · Proceedings, IEEE International Conference on Computer Design · 59 citations
  5. Type soundness for dependent object types (DOT)2016 · 59 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Nada Amin. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  2. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Nada Amin. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Harvard University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Harvard University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Nada Amin yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Nada Amin's CV people.csail.mit.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. About | Nada Amin at Harvard SEAS namin.seas.harvard.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Nada Amin To Join Harvard Computer Science Faculty | The Harvard Crimson thecrimson.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Nada Amin joins SEAS faculty seas.harvard.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Collapsing Towers of Interpreters (POPL 2018 - Research Papers) - POPL 2018 popl18.sigplan.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Collapsing Towers of Interpreters | metareflection.seas.harvard.edu metareflection.seas.harvard.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. dafny-annotator: AI-Assisted Verification of Dafny Programs arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Nada Amin, Sitan Chen appointed Kempner Institute associate faculty members news.harvard.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. Nada Amin - Kempner Institute kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. Nada Amin | Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences seas.harvard.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.