The research of Krebbers' group focusses on making software safe and secure through mathematical proofs. His group is working on understanding the semantics of widely used programming languages such as Rust, C and OCaml, without shying away from the dirty details such as pointers, exceptions, and concurrency. Based on these semantics, his group designs verification methods implemented as open source tools. An important aim is to make verification "modular" so that programs can be verified piece by piece, enabling scalability. These methods and tools are grounded in mathematical logic, and are verified themselves using proof assistants: computer programs that check the correctness of mathematical proofs.
Krebbers' group also works on developing the foundations of the next generation of programming languages and type systems. The aim is to catch as many programming errors at compile time. In his ERC Consolidator project, his group studies this problem in the context of computer programs where multiple tasks are executed concurrently.
Krebbers is interested in modernising programming education in the computer science curriculum. With his colleagues, he is redesigning the first-year programming course to use the new Rust programming language which automatically detects memory safety errors.
About Robbert Krebbers
Prof. dr. Robbert Krebbers (born 1987, Groesbeek) began his academic career at Radboud University, where he obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Computer Science. In 2011 he started his PhD programme, where he studied the mathematical semantics and program verification techniques for the widely used C programming language. He obtained his doctorate cum laude with his thesis “The C standard formalized in Rocq” in 2015.
After completing his PhD, Krebbers worked as postdoctoral researcher in the logic and semantics group at Aarhus University, Denmark, until 2016. He was then appointed assistant professor in the programming languages group at TU Delft until 2020. Afterwards, he worked as assistant professor at Radboud University and was appointed associate professor here in 2021.
During his postdoc, Krebbers co-founded the Iris framework for program verification, an active open source project which he is still co-leading today. Together with his Iris collaborators, Krebbers received the 2023 Alonzo Church award for most influential contribution to logic and computation over the past 25 years. He has also been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2024, for the COCONUT project, which focusses on the development of correct concurrent software using types. In 2026, he won the Dutch Prize for ICT Research for innovative research.