Rate My Professor Garrett Morris

J. Garrett Morris is an Assistant Professor and inaugural Emeriti-Faculty Scholar in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa, leading the Iowa Foundations of Programming Group and co-leading the Computational Logic Center. His research focuses on the foundations of programming languages and formal methods, including the development of type systems for safe concurrent and distributed programming, extensible data types and effects, substructural type systems for lock-freedom in concurrent programs, qualified types for generic abstractions and modular composition, session types, effect handlers, linear types, type classes and type families, and proof modularity in theorem provers. Morris also investigates pedagogy for formal methods in undergraduate computer science education.

Morris earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Portland State University in 2013, advised by Mark P. Jones as part of the High Assurance Systems Programming project, where he contributed to the Habit programming language. He pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Edinburgh's Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science with Phil Wadler and Sam Lindley, advancing session types and linear types for the Links language. Prior to joining the University of Iowa in 2020, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas from 2017. Morris has been honored with the NSF CAREER Award in 2021, a Distinguished Paper Award at POPL 2024, and multiple NSF grants such as $1.2 million in 2025 for unifying proof reuse, $599,000 in 2024 for Haskell programming innovations, $77,430 for undergraduate pedagogy, and NSF 2044815 for extensible types. Key publications include "Instance Chains: Type Class Programming Without Overlapping Instances" (2010, with M.P. Jones), "Variations on Variants" (2016), "Soundly Handling Linearity" (2024), "Or, Making Ad Hoc Extensible Data Types Less Ad Hoc" (2023), and works on hypersequent calculi for session types (2021). With over 900 Google Scholar citations, his contributions influence functional programming languages like Haskell and formal verification tools.