Peter O'Hearn

Education O'Hearn attained a BSc degree in computer science from Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia (1985), followed by MSc (1987) and PhD (1991) degrees from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His dissertation was on Semantics of Non-interference: A natural approach, supervised by Robert D. Tennent.

Career and research O'Hearn is best known for separation logic,

He conducted a study of programming languages which were similar to ALGOL, with his former doctoral advisor Robert D. Tennent, which became the book Algol-Like Languages.

Separation logic has given rise to the Infer Static Analyzer (Facebook Infer), a static program analysis utility developed by O'Hearn's team at Facebook. Since its inception, Infer has enabled Facebook engineers to resolve tens of thousands of bugs before reaching production. It was open sourced in 2016, and is used by Amazon Inc, Spotify, Mozilla, Uber, and others.

From 2021-2024 Peter led the development of a Code Security product for the Cybersecurity company Lacework. He returned to Meta to join the AI team in the Fall of 2024.

O'Hearn was an assistant professor at Syracuse University, New York, United States, from 1990 to 1995. He was a reader in computer science at Queen Mary University of London from 1996 to 1999 and then a full professor at Queen Mary until his move to University College London. At UCL he was granted a chair sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering and Microsoft Research. In 1997 he was a visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and in 2006 he was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Awards and honours In 2007, O'Hearn was granted a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.