Ph.D. Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara (2025)

M.S. Computer Science, Wright State University (2018)

B.S. Mathematics, Ohio University (2014)

Zachary Sisco is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the School of Data Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara, co-advised by Jonathan Balkind and Ben Hardekopf.

Zachary conducts research at the intersection of Programming Languages, Computer Architecture, and Formal Methods. His research integrates formal methods into open-source programming languages for chip design to support developer agility with correctness guarantees. Zachary’s work has been published in top venues in both fields of Programming Languages and Computer Architecture (e.g., PLDI and ASPLOS). Zachary received the Outstanding Dissertation Award (2025) in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Selected Publications

Control Logic Synthesis: Drawing the Rest of the OWL. Zachary D. Sisco, Andrew David Alex, Zechen Ma, Yeganeh Aghamohammadi, Boming Kong, Benjamin Darnell, Timothy Sherwood, Ben Hardekopf, Jonathan Balkind. Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 4 (ASPLOS), 2024.

Loop Rerolling For Hardware Decompilation. Zachary D. Sisco, Jonathan Balkind, Timothy Sherwood, Ben Hardekopf. Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2023.

Dissertation

Automated Reasoning for Agile and Robust Chip Design. Zachary D. Sisco. University of California, Santa Barbara, June 2025.