Timothy Zhou

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Hello! I’m a second-year PhD student at UCSD in the Programming Systems group, advised by Nadia Polikarpova and Loris D’Antoni. The goal of my research is to improve the way people write and reason about the correctness of their code. I work at the intersection of program synthesis, AI-assisted programming, and formal methods.

I did my undergrad at UIUC, where I graduated with degrees in CS and Math in 2024. While there I was advised by Talia Ringer as part of the Illinois Theorem Provers lab.

Contact me: [email protected].

papers

(* = equal contribution)

  1. ChopChop: a Programmable Framework for Semantically Constraining the Output of Language Models
    Shaan Nagy*, Timothy Zhou*, Nadia Polikarpova, and Loris D’Antoni
    POPL, 2026
    DOI
  2. Flexible and Efficient Grammar-Constrained Decoding
    Kanghee Park, Timothy Zhou, and Loris D’Antoni
    ICML, 2025
    DOI
  3. Passport: Improving Automated Formal Verification Using Identifiers
    Alex Sanchez-Stern*, Emily First*, Timothy Zhou, Zhanna Kaufman, Yuriy Brun, and Talia Ringer
    TOPLAS, 2023
    DOI
  4. Historiographer: Strongly-Consistent Distributed Reactive Programming with Minimal Locking
    Julia Freeman*, and Timothy Zhou*
    SPLASH Student Research Competition (First Place), 2023
    DOI

news

Jan 12, 2026 Presenting our work on ChopChop at POPL!
Sep 23, 2024 I started my PhD at UCSD.
May 01, 2024 I graduated from UIUC with degrees in Computer Science (Highest Honors) and Mathematics.
Oct 26, 2023 Historiographer won first place at the SPLASH Student Research Competition (undergraduate divsion).