Emily Yu is an Assistant Professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University. Her research broadly develops formal methods and automated reasoning techniques for building trustworthy systems.

More information about Emily Yu

A central theme of her work is certification—designing independently checkable evidence that makes the verification process more reliable and transparent for safety-critical systems. Her work on certification has influenced the development of hardware model checking infrastructure and solver reliability. This line of research received Distinguished Paper Awards at CAV 2025 and CAV 2026, the premier conference in formal verification. In addition, her research has been recognized with the Dutch Research Council (NWO) Veni Talent Program in the Netherlands and the highly competitive ESPRIT Fellowship from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in Austria.

Before joining Leiden University, Emily was a postdoctoral researcher (2023–2025) in Prof. Thomas Henzinger’s group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). She received her PhD in 2023 through the doctoral program Logical Methods in Computer Science (LogiCS), funded by the Austrian Science Fund, and the LIT AI Lab at Johannes Kepler University Linz, under the supervision of Prof. Armin Biere. Her doctoral thesis focused on hardware model checking certification. Prior to that, she completed her undergraduate studies in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, where she was advised by Prof. Alessio Lomuscio.