Joseph McMahan is a postdoctoral researcher in Seattle working for the SAMPL Group under Luis Ceze. His research focuses on computer architecture and one or more of {security, formal methods, deep learning}.

He earned his PhD in 2019 from UC Santa Barbara, where he worked with Timothy Sherwood at the ArchLab. His PhD thesis was centered around a novel computer architecture, the Zarf Architecture for Recursive Functions (Zarf), which seeks to alleviate the high cost of performing low-level verification and analysis on software systems; see ASPLOS '17, IEEE Micro Top Picks '18, and ISCA '19. His PhD work also dealt heavily with formal analysis of architectural side-channels; see Host '17, ISCA '18, and ATVA '18. His PhD thesis was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2020 ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award. He holds a B.A. in Physics from Princeton University.

Interests include coffee, music, fiction, modernist poetry, 3D printing, and video games.

Reach him at jmcmahan[at]cs.washington.edu.