Brandon Neth

PhD Student
Office: GS 749
Interests: Programming Languages, Compilers and High Performance Computing
Advisor: Dr. Michelle Strout

Biography

Brandon is a first year PhD student. After growing up outside of Cleveland, Ohio, he came to Tucson to study Computer Science and Mathematics here at UArizona. During undergrad, Brandon did research with professors in both the Computer Science department and the Classics department. In CS, he worked with Michelle Strout on the Science up to Par project. In Classics, he worked with Eleni Hasaki on experimental archaeology research surrounding Ancient Greek potter's wheels. Outside of academics, Brandon is passionate about music, ethics, and volunteering. Brandon is a regular volunteer at the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation and at Campus Pantry. He is also an active alumnus of the queer fraternity Delta Lambda Phi.

​​​​​Research Interests

Brandon's research interests are in the area of programming languages and high performance computing. In particular, Brandon is interested in how the polyhedral model can be used and extended to incorporate more aspects of programs, such as data representation.

What long-term project do you want to work on?

Brandon wants to work with Michelle Strout on her collaboration with University of Utah and Boise State to develop new ways of incorporating data representation and extra-program information into the optimization process. Brandon is also especially interested in working on efforts to improve representation in Computer Science, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

What do you enjoy most about your work?

I like 2 things most about my field: the scale and the recursiveness. First, everything related to HPC is big. It's exciting to know that you're working on some of the largest, fastest computers in the entire world. The second piece is related to languages. Just like human languages, programming languages are filled with self-referentiality and recursion. All languages impose restrictions on their uses, but nevertheless we use language to reason about all parts of the world, including language itself. This idea of self-encoding, and the limitations it presents, are endlessly fascinating to me.

What are your career goals?

My career goals are broad, but they do not lie in academia. That may mean working on HPC languages and systems at a national lab or working on a language or compiler team in industry. Regardless, part of those career goals include advocacy on many fronts: representation, labor, and environmental.

​​​​Tell us something interesting about yourself!

I love disco music, yoga, and my two cats Rosalind and Franklin. When I'm not standing on my head or dancing, I'm often found reading or working on my garden. I'm also an active member of our wall-to-wall union here at UArizona.