We are pleased to announce that Facebook Research Scientist Peter O’Hearn has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) at a ceremony today in London.

This is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society judges to have made a “substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science”.

The Royal Society is the oldest, and arguably most prestigious, national scientific society in the world. Founded in 1660 by King Charles II, it plays a major role in promoting science around the world. Fellows of the Royal Society are a select group of scientists and engineers. Past fellows include Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. Peter is the first Fellow from Facebook, and one of only a very few computer scientists ever appointed from industry.

Peter is a leader of several revolutions in programming languages and logic, leading to the invention of separation logic and concurrent separation logic, and the Infer static analysis platform. As a champion of putting theory into practice, Infer has been responsible for finding thousands of bugs in the Facebook codebase over the past 5 years. Open sourced in 2015, Infer’s use in industry has also grown, and now counts Amazon, Uber and Mozilla as users.

Peter has previously received the Gödel prize, won a CAV award  along with Facebook colleagues Josh Berdine, Cristiano Calcagno, Dino Distefano,  is a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from Dalhousie University.