Daniel Hillerström

I am PhD student within the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science (LFCS) admitted through one of the centres for doctoral training (CDT). I am a member of the programming languages research group within LFCS. My research interests revolve around taming programming with (side-)effects.

Specifically, my work concerns both the theory and practice of effect handlers, a novel, powerful, and modular control abstraction for implementing computational effects such as exceptions, concurrency, backtracking, input/output, state, and so forth as user-definable libraries. Throughout my PhD I have studied canonical implementation strategies for effect handlers as well as investigated their expressive power to characterise their place in the landscape of programming abstractions.

Why LFCS?

I chose to join LFCS due to its rich history in programming languages research. The foundations for modern programming languages research were laid at LFCS thirty years ago, and continues to this day to advance the state-of-the-art at the frontier of programming languages research.

Advice for PhD applicants

The key to a successful PhD is to have a supervisor with whom you can work well as the two of you will work together for the next three to four years. To find such a supervisor I recommend that you interview with as many potential supervisors from your areas of interest as possible. Do remember that the word "supervisor" is a contraction of "super friendly advisor".