About me

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

Hi! I’m a second-year Computer Science PhD student at Cornell. I work on programming languages & systems research in the Capra lab, advised by Adrian Sampson & Kevin Laeufer. I’m broadly interested in operating systems, functional programming, proof assistants and property-based testing.

At Cornell, I’m currently working on a DSL for specifying hardware communication protocols, with the aim of making it easier to test and debug such protocols. At AWS (Summers 2025/2026), I’m working on property-based testing (PBT) infrastructure for Lean, as a research intern with the Automated Reasoning Group.

I did my undergrad at Penn, where I worked on PBT research, advised by Harry Goldstein & Benjamin Pierce in the PLClub (Penn’s PL group). Before grad school, I worked in industry for a year as a data engineer.

Outside of CS, I enjoy playing the pipe organ. I study organ performance with Amanda Mole & Annette Richards, and work as an organist for Cornell’s Episcopal Church.

Here’s my resume and a list of projects I’ve done.

Research

• Specifying Hardware Communication as Programs
  Ernest Ng, Nikil Shyamsunder, Francis Pham, Adrian Sampson, Kevin Laeufer
  Ongoing work [Code]
  (An initial version of this work was presented by Nikil at the FMCAD ’25 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)

Talks

• Specifying Hardware Communication as Programs (slides)

  • YArch (Young Architect Workshop) @ ISCA ’26, June 2026
  • EPFL Programming Languages & Formal Methods Seminar (Invited), May 2026
  • NJPLS (New Jersey Programming Languages & Systems Seminar), May 2026

• Chamelean: Property-Based Testing for Lean via Metaprogramming (slides) (Work done at AWS)

  • Cornell Programming Languages Discussion Group, September 2025

• Mica: Automated Differential Testing for OCaml Modules (slides)

  • Bloomberg OCaml Developers Seminar (Invited), September 2024
  • OCaml Workshop @ ICFP ’24, September 2024
  • ICFP ’23 Student Research Competition, September 2023

Other

Have we met before at a conference? I’d love to hear from you! I was / will be at:

• YArch @ ISCA ’26 @ Raleigh
• Brown Systems Week ’26 @ Providence
• ASPLOS ’26 @ Pittsburgh
• Upstate PL @ Cornell
• NJPLS @ Cornell Tech (Dec ’24) / Princeton (Nov ’23) / Penn (May ’23 + May ’26)
• ICFP ’24 @ Milan
• POPL ’24 @ London
• ICFP ’23 @ Seattle
• CMMRS ’23 @ Saarbrücken
• OPLSS ’23 @ Eugene

Teaching

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

Cornell:

• CS 4160: Formal Verification (Rocq) (Spring 2026)
• CS 3410: Computer Systems (Fall 2025)

Penn:

• CIS 3800: Operating Systems (Fall 2023)
• Software Foundations Rocq seminar (for Penn’s REPL summer research program) (Summer 2023)
• CIS 1904/1940: Introduction to Haskell (Spring 2023)
• CIS 2400: Computer Systems (Fall 2022)
• CIS 5450: Big Data Analytics (Spring - Fall 2022, Head TA for the Fall)
• CIS 5500: Databases (Summer 2022)