Luca Cardelli
Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Microsoft Corporation

Luca Cardelli is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He works with the Programming Principles and Tools Group and his main interests are in type theory and operational semantics, mostly for applications to language design, semantics, and implementation. Currently he is working on global and mobile computation issues, in particular on computational and systems biology and spatial logics, a specification logic for distributed systems.

Luca implemented the first compiler for ML (the most popular typed functional language) and one of the earliest direct-manipulation user-interface editors. He was a member of the Modula-3 design committee and has designed a few experimental languages, of which the latest are Obliq, a distributed higher-order scripting language, and Polyphonic C#, an object-oriented language with modern concurrency abstractions. His more protracted research activity has been in establishing the semantic and type-theoretic foundations of object-oriented languages.

Luca is a fellow at the Royal Society and ACM. He was recently elected a member of the Academia Europea.

Luca was born in Montecatini Terme, Italy, studied at the University of Pisa until 1979 and has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh (1982). He worked at Bell Labs, Murray Hill and at Digital Equipment Corporation, Systems Research Center in Palo Alto before assuming his current position at Microsoft.