Most Productive PL Faculty (August 2026)

Here is a list of the most productive Programming Languages faculty in the past 5 years, according to their number of publications in top-tier conferences (POPL, PLDI, ICFP, and OOPSLA), adjusted by number of senior coauthors.

Column 22-26 is the absolute count in last 5 years: number of top-tier conference publications in the last 5 years.
Column Rel5 is the relative count in last 5 years: same, but adjusted for each paper’s number of senior coauthors – a paper with a single senior/faculty author counts as 1; one with two counts as 0.5; etc.

The reason for sorting by Rel5 is to prevent double-counting: in a hypothetical scenario where faculty members A and B include each other in all their paper to inflate their publication counts, their 22-26 will double, but their Rel5 will remain the same. Basically, this approach makes sure that no single piece of work can be counted as more than one research contribution.

The data was extracted on 2026-08-19 using pubstats (courtesy of Mathias Payer); it is augmented (by GPT 5.6 Sol) with affiliation and job title information, with the source of that info hyperlinked for easy verification. The source code of the script used to generate the table is available in my pubstats fork.

In total, the source data includes around 925 researchers who published at least one top PL paper in the last 5 years. Since the author data comes from CSRankings, it is limited to “full-time, tenure-track faculty members who are able to solely advise CS PhD students”.

Top 50 by relative publication count in the last 5 years

Sorted by the Rel5 column descending, then by 22-26 descending, then by name.

Rank	Name	Affiliation	Title	Total	22-26	Rel5
1	Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira	University of Hong Kong	Associate Professor	31	16	14.25
2	Robbert Krebbers	Radboud University	Professor of Software Science	32	18	12.15
3	Lars Birkedal	Aarhus University	Professor	50	23	10.53
4	Jeehoon Kang	FuriosaAI	Chief Research Officer	23	13	9.53
5	Isil Dillig	University of Texas at Austin	Professor	54	20	9.50
6	Jonathan Immanuel Brachthäuser	University of Tübingen	Full Professor	20	14	9.50
7	Nicolas Wu	Imperial College London	Professor of Computer Science	22	12	9.25
8	Derek Dreyer	Max Planck Institute for Software Systems	Scientific Director	61	22	9.10
9	Peter Müller 0001	ETH Zurich	Full Professor	23	12	8.42
10	Zhendong Su 0001	ETH Zurich	Full Professor	48	15	8.37
11	Lionel Parreaux	HKUST	Assistant Professor	11	9	8.00
12	Hiroshi Unno 0001	Tohoku University	Professor	17	12	7.67
13	Fredrik Kjolstad	Stanford University	Assistant Professor of Computer Science	15	9	7.50
14	Yizhou Zhang 0001	University of Waterloo	Assistant Professor	14	9	7.50
15	Adam Chlipala	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Arthur J. Conner (1888) Professor of Computer Science	34	12	7.45
16	Loris D’Antoni	University of California San Diego	Professor	27	13	7.17
17	Rupak Majumdar	Max Planck Institute for Software Systems	Scientific Director	34	11	7.17
18	Ningning Xie	University of Toronto	Assistant Professor	16	11	7.08
19	Sam Lindley	University of Edinburgh	Reader in Programming Language Design and Implementation	22	13	7.00
20	Stephanie Weirich	University of Pennsylvania	ENIAC President’s Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science	34	8	7.00
21	Thomas W. Reps	University of Wisconsin-Madison	J. Barkley Rosser Professor & Rajiv and Ritu Batra Chair Emeritus	50	14	6.83
22	Zhong Shao 0001	Yale University	Thomas L. Kempner Professor of Computer Science	43	12	6.67
23	Gilles Barthe	Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy	Scientific Director	30	9	6.50
24	Shriram Krishnamurthi	Brown University	Professor of Computer Science	21	9	6.50
25	Qirun Zhang	Georgia Institute of Technology	Catherine M. and James E. Allchin Early Career Associate Professor	18	9	6.33
26	Umang Mathur 0001	National University of Singapore	Presidential Young Professor (Assistant Professor)	17	12	6.28
27	Konstantinos Mamouras	Rice University	Assistant Professor of Computer Science	11	7	6.00
28	Roland Meyer 0001	TU Braunschweig	Professor	9	7	6.00
29	Dana Drachsler-Cohen	Technion	Associate Professor, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering	6	6	6.00
30	P. Madhusudan	University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign	Professor, Computer Science	25	9	5.67
31	Martin T. Vechev	ETH Zurich	Full Professor of Computer Science	51	7	5.67
32	Azadeh Farzan	University of Toronto	Professor	18	8	5.50
33	François Pottier	Inria	Senior Researcher	23	7	5.50
34	Cyrus Omar	University of Michigan	Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering	11	6	5.50
35	Xin Zhang 0035	Peking University	Assistant Professor	13	6	5.50
36	Ranjit Jhala	University of California San Diego	Professor, Computer Science and Engineering	46	13	5.45
37	Chung-Kil Hur	Seoul National University	Professor of Computer Science and Engineering	27	8	5.33
38	Justin Hsu	Cornell University	Associate Professor of Computer Science	22	8	5.33
39	Amal Ahmed 0001	Northeastern University	Professor and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs	25	7	5.33
40	Amir Kafshdar Goharshady	University of Oxford	Professor of Computer Science	14	7	5.33
41	Leonidas Lampropoulos	University of Maryland	Assistant Professor of Computer Science	12	7	5.33
42	Ilya Sergey	National University of Singapore	Associate Professor	22	8	5.25
43	Nadia Polikarpova	University of California San Diego	Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering	21	10	5.08
44	Azalea Raad	Imperial College London	Reader (Associate Professor) in Programming Languages	20	11	5.00
45	Saman P. Amarasinghe	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of EECS	28	8	5.00
46	Armando Solar-Lezama	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Distinguished Professor of Computing and Professor of EECS	30	7	5.00
47	Sebastian Erdweg	Karlsruhe Institute of Technology	Professor and Head of the Programming Languages Group	22	5	5.00
48	Steve Zdancewic	University of Pennsylvania	Schlein Family President’s Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair	34	10	4.92
49	Joost-Pieter Katoen	RWTH Aachen University	Universitätsprofessor	13	8	4.92
50	Joseph Tassarotti	New York University	Assistant Professor of Computer Science	19	13	4.87