I am a fourth year PhD student in Computer Science at UW-Madison. Currently, I am a member of both the MadPL and the MadS&P research groups, where I'm advised by the wonderful Ethan Cecchetti. My research, at the nexus of programming languages and security, primarily involves language design for programming using zkSNARKs. I'm particularly interested in building language features that can help enforce programmer-defined security and privacy policies.
I'm also fortunate to have been advised in the past by Loris D'Antoni at UW-Madision and Işil Dillig at UT Austin, where I made use of formal methods to develop new program synthesizers (automated tools that can generate programs).

In my free time, I love traveling, hiking, cooking (and eating!), photography, and reading books. I also have gotten into biking and wheel pottery during my time here in Madison.

Publications

• Automating Pruning in Top-Down Enumeration for Program Synthesis Problems with Monotonic Semantics (OOPSLA 2024)
  Keith J.C. Johnson*, Rahul Krishnan*, Thomas Reps, Loris D'Antoni
  [Talk] [PDF] [Extended] [Artifact]

• Synthesizing Fine-Grained Synchronization Protocols for Implicit Monitors (OOPSLA 2022)
  Kostas Ferles, Benjamin Sepanski, Rahul Krishnan, James Bornholt, Isil Dillig
  [PDF] [Extended] [Code]

Workshops

• Leveraging Duality for Programming with zkSNARKs (PriSC 2025, colocated with POPL 2025)
  Rahul Krishnan, Ethan Cecchetti
  [Talk] [PDF]

Teaching

• TA for CS642 Introduction to Information Security, UW-Madison, Spring 2024
• TA for CS536 Introduction to PL and Compilers, UW-Madison, Spring 2023 [link]
• TA for CS240 Discrete Mathematics, UW-Madison, Fall 2022
• TA for CS389L Automated Logical Reasoning (Grad), UT-Austin, Spring 2021 [link]
• TA for CS311H Discrete Math (Honors), UT-Austin, Fall 2020 [link]
• Mentor for Program Synthesis Directed Reading Program, Spring 2021 [reading list]