Derek Egolf
(he/him/his)
PhD Student

Research interests
- Formal Methods
- Synthesis of performant systems
- Notions of approximate correctness
Education
- BS in Computer Science and Mathematics, Tufts University
Biography
Derek Egolf is a doctoral student at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, advised by Stavros Tripakis and Pete Manolios. His doctoral research, which he began in 2021 and expects to complete in 2026, focuses on formal methods.
Recognizing that automatic synthesis of correct-by construction programs often produces inefficient, unusable programs, Egolf is interested in synthesis algorithms that can produce correct and efficient systems. He is intrigued by approximate notions of correctness, which may make some of the problems more tractable.
Egolf has published multiple papers on formal methods with colleagues at Tufts University—one of which he presented at LangSec 2021—and is a member of Khoury College’s Formal Methods Group.
Labs and groups
Recent publications
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Accelerating Protocol Synthesis and Detecting Unrealizability with Interpretation Reduction
Citation: Derek Egolf, Stavros Tripakis. (2025). Accelerating Protocol Synthesis and Detecting Unrealizability with Interpretation Reduction CoRR, abs/2501.14585. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.14585 -
Verbatim++: verified, optimized, and semantically rich lexing with derivatives
Citation: Derek Egolf, Sam Lasser, and Kathleen Fisher. 2022. Verbatim++: verified, optimized, and semantically rich lexing with derivatives. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP 2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 27–39. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3497775.3503694 -
Verbatim: A Verified Lexer Generator
Citation: D. Egolf, S. Lasser and K. Fisher, "Verbatim: A Verified Lexer Generator," 2021 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2021, pp. 92-100, doi: 10.1109/SPW53761.2021.00022.