About me

Email: ernest@cs.cornell.edu
GitHub: ngernest

Hi! I’m a second-year Computer Science PhD student at Cornell, working on programming languages research. I’m interested in functional programming, property-based testing (PBT), proof assistants and type systems.

This past summer, I interned with the Automated Reasoning group at AWS, working on PBT infrastructure for Lean.

I did my undergrad at Penn, where I worked on PBT research, advised by Harry Goldstein & Benjamin Pierce. Before grad school, I worked in industry for a year as a data engineer.

Outside of PL, I enjoy running & playing the pipe organ.

Feel free to take a look at my resume, or the projects page on this site!

Research

• Building an Interpreter for an Imperative Hardware Interface Specification Language
  Nikil Shyamsunder, Francis Pham, Ernest Ng, Adrian Sampson, Kevin Laeufer
  FMCAD 2025 Student Forum

• Mica: Automated Differential Testing for OCaml Modules
  Ernest Ng, Harrison Goldstein, Benjamin Pierce
  OCaml Workshop 2024 [Slides] [Talk Video] [Code]
  Received 2nd place at the ICFP 2023 SRC (poster)

Other

Have we met before? I’d love to hear from you! I was at:

• Upstate PL @ Cornell
• NJPLS @ Cornell Tech / Princeton / Penn
• ICFP ’24 @ Milan (student volunteer)
• POPL ’24 @ London (student volunteer)
• ICFP ’23 @ Seattle (SRC participant)
• CMMRS ’23 @ Saarbrücken
• OPLSS ’23 @ Eugene

Teaching

I’ve served as a teaching assistant for the following courses:

Cornell:

• CS 3410: Computer Systems

Penn:

• CIS 1904/1940: Introduction to Haskell
• CIS 2400: Computer Systems
• CIS 3800: Operating Systems
• Software Foundations mini-course (abridged version of CIS 5000, part of Penn’s REPL program)
• CIS 5450: Big Data Analytics (Head TA, Fall ’22)
• CIS 5500: Databases