Michael Franz

Pioneer in mobile code and dynamic compilation, Franz led the Secure Systems and Languages Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine — one of the top research teams on dynamic compilation, virtual machines, and language-based computer security. He is best known for his invention, with a former Ph.D. student, of the "Trace Tree" compilation technique. In collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation, his research group transitioned the JavaScript compilation technology invented in his lab into the Firefox browser, where it became the basis of the "TraceMonkey" JavaScript engine, used by hundreds of millions of people every day.

Franz has served as a Tenured Full Professor of Computer Science at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine from January 1996. His research has focused primarily on software security and on virtual machine technology, including just-in-time compilation. Other research interests have included code compression, compiling for low-power usage, programming languages and architectures for component-based software construction, and service-oriented computing.

In addition, from February 2007, he has held an honorary appointment as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (by courtesy) in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, University of California, Irvine. From August 2010 to September 2011, while on sabbatical from the University of California, Irvine, Franz was a Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich. He graduated 17 Ph.D. students and has served as Principal Investigator on a wide range of competitive grants from the federal government (NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFRL, DHS), totaling well over $10M.

He earned a Diplom-Ingenieur in Computer Science in 1989 and his Doctor of Technical Sciences in Computer Science in 1994 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) in Switzerland. His doctoral dissertation, "Code Generation On-The-Fly: A Key To Portable Software," was published in early 1994, predating the arrival of Java by two full years. Franz is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Scientist and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

He was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in 1989 and a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 1997. In 2007, he received both UC Irvine's Outstanding Professor of the Year Award from the Class of 2007 and the Dean's Award for Graduate Student Mentoring from his school. That same year, the graduating class of seniors at UC Irvine voted him their "Outstanding Professor of the Year."

In 2010, Franz received the highest honor for research from his university's academic senate, the Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research. He also received the IEEE Computer Society 2012 Technical Achievement Award, "For pioneering contributions to just-in-time compilation and optimization, significantly advancing web application technology." He holds an awarded patent on mobile-code security and has several further patents pending, has served as a technical expert witness in litigation, and is a sought-after speaker and panelist both nationally and internationally, as well as a frequent reviewer for conferences, journals, and funding agencies.