[2020] One of the recipients of this year’s Future Leader’s Fellowship, Dr. Sam Lindley is currently an honorary member of the School of Informatics and will re-join us fully in February 2021. Image Dr. Sam Lindley Sam is one of three academics at the University announced as recipients of the Fellowship; he is joined by Drs. Jennifer Garden (School of Chemistry) and Lindsay Jaacks (the Global Academy of Agriculture and Food security). The Future Leader’s Fellowship is a UK government initiative that supports early career researchers and innovators with remarkable potential. The latest round of awards recognises 101 academics and innovators, including the three from Edinburgh, and marks the third generation of Fellowships of its kind from UKRI (UK Research and Innovation). Dr. Sam Lindley is currently an Associate Professor at Heriot Watt University, an honorary member of the School of Informatics and will be re-joining the School in February 2021. His research focuses on the design and implementation of programming languages to enable the development of more robust software. He works at the interface between theory and practice, having spent time in industry as well as academia. A significant aspect of Sam’s recent research is a general programming feature known as effect handlers. Effect handlers allow programmers to define, customise, and compose a range of crucial programming features ranging from concurrency to probability, inside the programming language. In collaboration with industrial project partners including Facebook and Microsoft, Sam will add effect handlers to systems as diverse as WebAssembly – the new target language for the web – and Hack, the language in which the Facebook app is written. Sam is also lead developer of the Links web programming language, a fruitful platform for programming languages research which serves as the foundation for several ongoing research projects. I am delighted to have been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. This will allow me to develop a radical new programming paradigm called Effect Handler Oriented Programming (or EHOP for short). EHOP will empower software developers to build modular interactive software, enabling the development of safe, secure, and reliable applications. Dr. Sam LindleyA recipient of the UKRI Future Leader's Fellowship Fellowship programme The Future Leaders Fellowship programme is part of the Government’s modern industrial strategy, which aims to secure the UK as a world-leader in the field of scientific research and innovation. An overall investment of £109 million will help to establish the careers of exemplary research and innovation leaders across UK business and academia. UKRI announces new fellows through six rigorous competition rounds over the three years of the Future Leaders Fellowships programme. Awardees will each receive between £400,000 and £1.5 million over an initial four years. The money received by the Fellows supports their career development, as well as the development of challenging and innovative projects. Related Links Sam Lindley This article was published on 2024-03-18
