Rate My Professor Alex Potanin

Alex Potanin is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the Australian National University. He holds a BSc(Hons) and a PhD in Programming Languages from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, with his doctorate conferred in 2007. His research focuses on programming languages and software verification, with contributions to type systems involving ownership, immutability, and capabilities that have influenced languages such as Rust. He developed the Wyvern programming language emphasizing security and usability, with its concepts impacting the module system of CUE and elements of Scala. Since joining ANU in 2022, his work has extended to trustworthy systems and quantum program verification, including the Fiducia language and embeddings in Dafny. Potanin previously served as a Lecturer in Software Engineering at Victoria University of Wellington and held sabbatical positions at Carnegie Mellon University and Kyoto University. He is a Permanent Member of IFIP Working Group 2.4, a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Trustworthy Systems group at UNSW Sydney, and leads GenAI teaching initiatives at ANU under a partnership with Anthropic. He received the 2025 ANU HDR Supervisor of the Month award.