Max Willsey

I’m a third-year Ph.D. student at the University of Washington Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. I work between the PLSE, MISL, and Sampa groups applying programming language techniques to problems in architecture and synthetic biology.

I’m currently working on programming models for microfluidic chips. These architectures promise to make labs-on-a-chip (LoCs) scalable and affordable, but issues like high error rates, resource management, and concurrency make them difficult to program. The Puddle framework aims to provide a safer, easier way to program these devices.

Outside of work, I enjoy running, reading, and crosswords. I (with the help of several others) maintain crossbot, your friendly neighborhood crossword-tracking robot.

News

Apr 19

I’m very excited to be speaking at the Biochips Summer School at CU Boulder. I’ll be joining a bunch of other exciting speakers to talk about building, programming, and using digital microfluidic devices. Check it out!

Apr 15

The Allen School put together a nice news piece on some of our recent work, including our ASPLOS and Nature Communications papers.

Mar 18

I’ll be giving two talks at ASPLOS 2019! In the technical track, I’ll talk about Puddle, our new microfluidic programming system. Later in the Wild and Crazy Ideas track, I’ll start a discussion about cloud scale microfluidics.

Jan 5

I’m super excited to be co-teaching CSE 351 this quarter with Luis! This course covers the hardware-software interface including C, assembly, virtual memory, caches, and so on.

Jan 1

Some folks in the MISL group put together a paper about our vision of a hybrid molecular-electronic computing platform. It’s in the January 2019 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE.

2018 Nov

Our paper on Puddle and PurpleDrop was accepted to ASPLOS 2019. Check out the preprint!

2018 Nov

Our poster on Puddle at the Allen School Affiliates program got runner-up for the Madrona Prize.