Patrick Lafontaine

West Lafayette, Indiana, United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Patrick Lafontaine is a PhD candidate in computer science at Purdue University focused on compilers, programming languages, program synthesis, and verification, with eight years of software experience spanning research and industry. He interned as an Applied Scientist at AWS Systems Manager where he combined type theory, abstract interpretation, and machine learning for interpretable anomaly detection, and previously contributed to formalizing binding semantics for shader languages in Cornell’s Capra group. A passionate Rust programmer, he has extended the educational Bril compiler IR—adding a Rust interface, speculation effects, optimizations, and interpreter features—alongside projects in Python, Java, OCaml, and C. He cares deeply about compiler infrastructure and refinement-type-driven synthesis, and enjoys turning principled research into practical, open-source tooling. An under-the-radar trait: he blends low-level systems work with formal methods, making complex verification ideas usable in real-world toolchains.

8 years of coding experience

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Purdue University

Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at Cornell University

Cornell University College of Engineering

Advanced Regents Diploma with Honors, Advanced Regents Diploma with Honors at Carmel Central School District

Github Skills (6)

compiler-design10

rust10

intermediate-language10

intermediate-code10

data-structures8

data-structure8

Programming languages (16)

JavaCSSC++RustHTMLSvelteErlangTypeScript

Github contributions (5)

sampsyo/bril

Sep 2020 - Jan 2023

an educational compiler intermediate representation

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:66 reviews, 160 commits, 66 PRs in 2 years 4 months

Contributions summary:Patrick focused on developing a Rust interface and extending the core functionality of the compiler intermediate representation. They implemented a Bril-Rust interface, adding new effect operations for speculation and feature gating code for memory and speculation features. Furthermore, the user added functionality for outputting a program. The user's work also involved adding optimizations and building out the interpreter.

representationbrilcompiler-constructioncompilertranspiler

Pat-Lafon/z3.rs

Jan 2023 - May 2024

Rust bindings for the Z3 solver.

Contributions:4 PRs, 74 pushes, 14 branches in 1 year 4 months

rustrust-bindingssolver

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