Dominik Winterer

Office: Room 2.81, Kilburn Building
Email: [email protected]

Research Interests: Software Security, Software Engineering, Programming Languages,

Dominik is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Cyber Security in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, where he leads the Formal Methods Engineering Lab. His research focuses on the reliability of the automated reasoning tools used to verify safety- and security-critical software, spanning SMT solvers such as Z3 and cvc5, fuzzing and grammar-based test generation, continuous testing of solver development, and AI-based bug fixing. These tools underpin industrial verification, for example at AWS to verify cloud services. He has led one of the largest academic bug-hunting campaigns to date, uncovering over 1,800 bugs and enabling more than 1,300 fixes in SMT solvers. Before joining Manchester in September 2025, Dominik completed his PhD and a postdoc at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, following an MSc at the University of Freiburg in Germany, and held research internships with the Automated Reasoning Group at AWS and at IBM Research in the United States. For his work on SMT solver testing, Dominik received an ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award at PLDI 2020, a Google Open Source Peer Bonus for exceptional contributions to open source with his tool yinyang, and an Amazon Research Award (as Co-I). He serves on the programme committees of flagship venues including ICSE, FSE, PLDI, OOPSLA, CAV and IEEE EuroS&P, and co-organises the international SMT solver competition (SMT-COMP).