Resume - CV - Sam Van den Vonder

Professional

Postdoctoral Researcher
2022-Present

Part of the Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

My research is focussed on security mechanisms for offline available distributed data structures. Specifically, the goal is to design and implement the first security layer for JSON CRDTs that supports fine-grained, sub-document level access control. This research is supported by the Cybersecurity Research Program Flanders.

Education

Doctor of Science
2016-2022

Part of the Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

During my PhD I researched advanced techniques to implement distributed event-based systems, specifically focussing on integrating reactive programming with imperative programming. My work contributed to programming language design, event-based (reactive) programming, and distributed systems architecture, emphasising both practical implementations and theoretical foundations. The research was supported by a PhD fellowship awarded by the Research Foundation - Flanders.

Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Master of Science in Applied Sciences & Engineering: Computer Science (with great distinction)

2014-2016

Master of Science in Applied Sciences & Engineering: Computer Science (with great distinction)

Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science (with distinction)

2011-2014

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science (with distinction)

Skills

An excerpt of skills that I acquired throughout the years.

Event-driven architectures

Reactive programming, pub/sub, message brokers

Distributed systems

Microservices, actors, CRDTs

Project management

Grant writing, deliverable planning, people management, student supervision

Software engineering

Requirements analysis, design, testing, property-based testing, CI/CD pipelines

University teaching

Algorithms and datastructures, parallel and distributed systems

Programming language design

Formal semantics, functional programming, object-oriented programming

Public speaking

International conferences, workshops, meetups

Full-stack development

React, Node, Express, Django, Flask, ...

I am programming language agnostic, and during my PhD I demonstrated my ideas by designing a new programming language (called "Stella"). Some of the languages that I have used more than others include:

TypeScript

Racket

Python

Scala

LaTeX

Java

C#

Haskell

Teaching, Managerial, and Publications

In 2016-2019 I taught "Parallelism and Distribution", third year bachelor level.
In 2019-2025 I taught "Algorithms and Datastructures 1", first year bachelor level.
I guided 7 bachelor thesis students
I guided 1 master thesis student
I have published to top venues including OOPSLA, ECOOP, and ACM Computing Surveys. A list of my publications is available.