Yuriy Brun

Yuriy Brun is an American computer scientist and Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on software engineering, including software fairness, automated program repair, and formal verification. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2025 and is a Distinguished Member of the ACM.

Education Brun received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering, a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, and a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003. He earned a Master of Science in Computer Science in 2006 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science in 2008, both from the University of Southern California, where his doctoral advisor was Nenad Medvidović. His dissertation was titled "Self-assembly for discreet, fault-tolerant, and scalable computation on Internet-sized distributed networks."

Career After completing his doctorate, Brun held a Computing Innovation Fellowship at the University of Washington from 2009 to 2012, working with Professor David Notkin. He joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a faculty member in 2012 and currently holds the rank of Professor. He co-directs the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER) and the PLASMA laboratory.

Brun serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE).

Research Software fairness Brun's research contributed to establishing software fairness—the study of discriminatory behavior in software systems—as a subfield of software engineering. His 2017 paper "Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination," co-authored with Alexandra Meliou, introduced Themis, an automated tool for detecting discriminatory outputs in software, and received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ESEC/FSE 2017. The IEEE Computer Society's Technical Council on Software Engineering awarded Brun the TCSE New Directions Award in 2021, citing his contribution "for the establishment of a new research direction in the area of software fairness testing." The fairness research has been covered by Bloomberg, Fast Company, and ACM TechNews.

For this work, Brun received the Google Inclusion Research Award in 2021 and a Meta Research Award in 2021 (with Philip Thomas).

Automated program repair Brun's work on speculative analysis—a technique that helps software developers anticipate and resolve conflicts before they arise during collaborative development—was identified in a 2015 survey of software engineering practitioners as the most industrially relevant research published in the preceding five years, among 571 papers examined. His paper "Continuous Analysis of Collaborative Design," published at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA), received the Best Paper Award. His earlier paper "An Architectural Style for Solving Computationally Intensive Problems on Large Networks," co-authored with Nenad Medvidović, received the ACM/IEEE SEAMS Most Influential Paper Award in 2020.

Brun also contributed to the study of overfitting in automated program repair. His 2015 paper "Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease? Overfitting in Automated Program Repair" introduced methods for quantifying the degree to which automatically generated software patches fail to generalize beyond the test suite used to produce them. The paper received the ACM FSE Test of Time Honorable Mention Award in 2025.

Automated formal verification Brun has contributed to automating formal verification—the mathematical proof of software correctness—using machine learning. His 2020 paper "TacTok: Semantics-Aware Proof Synthesis" received the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award at OOPSLA 2020. His 2023 paper "Baldur: Whole-Proof Generation and Repair with Large Language Models" received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ESEC/FSE 2023. His 2025 paper "Rango: Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Proving for Automated Software Verification" received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2025.

Awards and honors Year Award 2025 IEEE Fellow 2025 ACM FSE Test of Time Honorable Mention Award 2025 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ICSE 2025 2023 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ESEC/FSE 2023 2022 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ICSE 2022 2021 IEEE Computer Society TCSE New Directions Award 2021 Google Inclusion Research Award 2021 Amazon Research Award 2021 Meta Research Award (with Philip Thomas) 2020 ACM/IEEE SEAMS Most Influential Paper Award 2020 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Artifact Award, ICSE 2020 2020 ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award, OOPSLA 2020 2019 ACM Distinguished Member 2017 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ESEC/FSE 2017 2017 IEEE ICSA Best Paper Award 2017 Lilly Fellowship for Teaching Excellence 2017 UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Science Outstanding Teacher Award 2015 National Science Foundation CAREER Award 2015 Google Faculty Research Award 2014 Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation Award 2013 IEEE TCSC Young Achiever in Scalable Computing Award 2011 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ESEC/FSE 2011