Research Interests

J. Garrett Morris studies the foundations of programming: how we construct programs and how we reason about them. His thesis is that advances in type systems empower programmers to create better-written, better-understood programs:

• More precise type systems better characterize program behavior. For example, he studied the use of substructural type systems to guarantee lock freedom in concurrent programs. 
• More expressive type systems enable powerful, generic abstractions. For example, he studied the use of qualified types to capture a uniform description of a variety of methods for composing records, variants, and program modules. 

These advances form a virtuous cycle. More precise types enable better abstractions, while expressive abstractions make precise type systems easy to use.

Professor Morris a co-director of the Computational Logic Center with Professors Katherine Kosaian and Cesare Tinelli.

Research Interests (Keywords)

Programming Languages

Recent Publications

• Soundly Handling Linearity. Wenhao Tang, Daniel Hillerström, Sam Lindley, and J .Garrett Morris. In Proc. ACM Prog. Lang. 8 (POPL) (January 2024). (Distinguished paper.)
• Separating Session Smoothly. Simon Fowler, Wen Kokke, Ornela Dardha, Ssam Lindley, and J. Garrett Morris. In Log. Methods Comput. Sci. 19 (3) (2023).
• Generic Programming with Extensible Data Types: Or, Making Ad Hoc Extensible Data Types Less Ad Hoc. Alex Hubers and J. Garrett Morris. In Proc. ACM Prog. Lang. 7 (ICFP) (September 2023).
• A Type-Based Approach to Divide-and-Conquer Recursion in Coq. Pedro Abreu, Benjamin Delaware, Alex Hubers, Christa Jenkins, J. Garrett Morris, and Aaron Stump. In Proc. ACM Prog. Lang. 7 (POPL) (January 2023).
• Partial Type Constructors in Practice. Apoorv Ingle, Alex Hubers, and J. Garrett Morris. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Haskell, Haskell ’22, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2022.
• Partial Type Constructors; or, making ad hoc data types less ad hoc. Mark P. Jones, J. Garrett Morris, Richard Eisenberg. In Proc. ACM Prog. Lang. 4, POPL (January 2020).
• Towards Races in Linear Logic. Wen Kokke, J. Garrett Morris, Philip Wadler. In Coordination Models and Languages - 21st IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, volume 11533 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 37–53, Springer, 2019.
• Abstracting Extensible Data Types; Or, Rows By Any Other Name. In Proc. J. Garrett Morris, James McKinna. In Proc. ACM Prog. Lang. 3, POPL (January 2019).
• Exceptional Asynchronous Session Types: Session Types Without Tiers. Simon Fowler, Sam Lindley, J. Garrett Morris, Sára Decova. In Proc. ACM Prog. Lang. 3, POPL (January 2019).
• The Root Cause of Blame: Contracts for Intersection and Union Types. Jack Williams, J. Garrett Morris and Philip Wadler. In Proc. ACM Prog. Lang. 2, OOPSLA (October 2018).