Simon Peyton Jones, MA, FACM, FBCS, CEng, graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London, and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University, before moving to Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998. He is now an Engineering Fellow in Epic Games.
Simon's main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages.
More generally, Simon is interested in language design, rich type systems, compiler technology, code generation, runtime systems, virtual machines, and garbage collection. He is particularly motivated by direct use of principled theory to practical language design and implementation -- that is one reason he loves functional programming so much.
He is also chair of Computing at School, the grass-roots organisation that was at the epicentre of the 2014 reform of the English computing curriculum.
Simon's home page is at https://simon.peytonjones.org
Professional position
- Engineering Fellow, Epic Games
