Filip Sieczkowski

I am an assistant professor at the University of Wrocław, Poland. I begun my computer science education here in Wrocław, working on interderivation of semantics with Dariusz Biernacki for my MSc. I then moved to Denmark, first to the ITU Copenhagen, where I obtained my PhD, working mostly on higher-order separation logic with Lars Birkedal and Peter Sestoft's group. I then moved to the Aarhus University, where I continued working with Lars and his group on separation logic and relational reasoning about programs, culminating in (an early version of) the Iris framework. Afterwards I moved to Inria Paris, where I worked with Umut Acar on semantics of parallelism, and returned home to Wrocław as an assistant professor in the programming languages research group. In 2021 I took an extended leave of absence from Wrocław to accept an assistant professorship at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. I returned to Wrocław in the autumn of 2025.

My research interests revolve predominantly around semantics of programming languages and modular methods of reasoning about programs. These range from separation logic — I was among the recipients of the 2023 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation and the 2025 Most Influential POPL Paper Award for my role in the early development of Iris — to relational models of sophisticated language features (concurrency, effect handlers, GADTs) and developments in operational semantics. These have inspired my model-driven approach to programming language design, where a model of the language and its properties influence the design choices for language features — which often leads to improved reasoning principles or stronger safety properties. Due to long-term use of interactive theorem provers, I am also interested in both practical and foundational issues related to formalised mathematics and dependently-typed programming.

Contact

Recent Publications

Service

I have served on the Programme Committees of POPL 2026, ICFP 2024, TYDE 2023, MFPS 2023, PPDP 2022, POPL 2022, FoSSaCS 2021, HOPE 2020 (co-chair), HOPE 2018 (co-chair), HOPE 2017, Coq Workshop 2018 and ML Family Workshop 2018

Until September 2025 I used to represent Heriot-Watt in the Steering Committee of Scottish Programming Languages Institute, and have organised the 2022 edition of the Scottish Programming Languages and Verification Summer School with Kathrin Stark and Katya Komendantskaya.