Photo: Stephen Chong

Stephen Chong

Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, Harvard SEAS
Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies, Computer Science
Faculty Dean, Winthrop House

Email: 
Pronouns:  He/him/his
Office: SEC 4.414
Office hours: See below
More contact details...

Research Interests

My research helps programmers write trustworthy programs. My primary area of interest is language-based information security: using programming language techniques to provide information security assurance.

Recent publications

Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies

I am the co-Director of Undergraduate Studies (co-DUS) for Harvard Computer Science, with Boaz Barak. For DUS-related issues, please email , which goes to all Computer Science DUSes as well as ADUS Adam Hesterberg and UPC Beth Musser.

Information about the Harvard SEAS undergraduate program in Computer Science is available at https://csadvising.seas.harvard.edu/. This website answers a lot of common questions, and has links to forms.

See below for my office hours. You are also welcome to attend the office hours of anyone in the CS DUS Team.

Office Hours

My office hours for the next two weeks are listed here. Please note that these office hours are intended for current Harvard community members. If you are not currently a member of the Harvard community and would like to contact me, please email me.

My office hours are typically individual meetings. Some of my office hours are drop-in (no appointment needed), others can be self-scheduled by following the instructions on this page about self-scheduling appointments with me. Currently, the self-scheduled appointments can be either in person (in SEC 4.414) or on Zoom; all drop-in appointments are on Zoom.

For Zoom meetings, please use this URL to join: https://harvard.zoom.us/my/stevechong. You may be in a waiting room if I am currently meeting with someone else.

If you are unable to attend my office hours, or have an urgent matter, you are welcome to email me to arrange an appointment. For matters related to undergraduate studies in Computer Science, you can attend the office hours of anyone in the CS DUS Team.

Teaching

In Fall 2023 I am teaching CS 153 (Compilers). In Spring 2024 I will teach a new graduate level couse, CS 254 (Formal Methods for Computer Security).

Previous courses:

Prospective students

Information for (undergraduate and graduate) students that are interested in joining my research group can be found here. Please read this page before contacting me. General information for Harvard undergraduates interested in research in Computer Science is available here.

Selected Projects

  • Formulog Extends Datalog with mechanisms to construct and reason about SMT formulas.
  • Previous projects
    • PRINCESS Autonomous adaptation of software to changes in its environment.
    • Computing Over Distributed Sensitive Data Achieve many benefits of data sharing without data owners having to share the data.
    • Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data Enhance technologies and policies to protect personal data used in research studies.
    • Shill: a secure shell scripting language.
    • Accrue Providing language-based security guarantees proportional to programmer effort.
    • CHILI Enabling the execution of code of unknown origin while guaranteeing that the code is not vulnerable to various classes of security attacks.

People

Affiliations

Professional activities

Funding and Conflicts

My research has been supported by IARPA, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, DARPA (BRASS,CHESS, and CSL programs), AFOSR, NSF Awards 1054172, 1551249, 1237235, 1421770, 1524052, 1565387), and a Google Faculty Research Award. I also engage in paid and pro bono consulting on software security and programming language technologies.

Brief bio

(Bio suitable for talk announcements, etc.)

I completed a Ph.D. at Cornell University in August 2008, under the guidance of Andrew Myers. Prior to graduate school, I spent several years working as a consultant and contractor. I received a B.Sc.(Hons) and B.A. from Victoria University of Wellington, in Wellington, New Zealand. My wife, Kiran Gajwani, is a Faculty Dean at Winthrop House and a Lecturer/Advisor and Associate Director of Undergraduate Advising in the Economics Department at Harvard.