Emery Berger is a Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. He is an Amazon Scholar and currently is on leave at Amazon Web Services.
Professor Berger has been a Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research and at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) / Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Professor Berger’s research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance.
He and his group are the creators of a number of influential software systems including Hoard (http://www.hoard.org), a fast and scalable memory manager that accelerates multithreaded applications (used by companies including British Telecom, Cisco, Crédit Suisse, Reuters, Royal Bank of Canada, SAP, and Tata, and on which the Mac OS X memory manager is based); DieHard, an error-avoiding memory manager that directly influenced the design of the Windows 7 Fault-Tolerant Heap; and DieHarder, a secure memory manager that was an inspiration for hardening changes made to the Windows 8 heap.
His honors include a Microsoft Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Lilly Teaching Fellowship, the Distinguished Artifact Award for PLDI 2014, the Most Influential Paper Award at OOPSLA 2012, five papers selected as CACM Research Highlights, a Google Research Award, and a Microsoft SEIF Award; he was named an ACM Fellow in 2019.