people

Sean Kauffman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen’s University. Before coming to Queen’s, Sean obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo and spent two years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Aalborg University in Denmark. Sean came back to academia after spending more than ten years working in industry as a software engineer, where his last position was a principal software engineer for Oracle.
Sean’s research focuses on safety-critical software and fits into the broad themes of Formal Methods, Runtime Verification, Anomaly Detection, and Explainable AI. He has collaborated on research with partners such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Embedded Systems Institute, QNX, and Pratt and Whitney Canada. Sean’s teaching philosophy focuses on fostering engagement, using techniques like active learning, productive failure, and peer instruction.

Nick Mertin is a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Joshua Marshall and Dr. Sean Kauffman, investigating formal verification and validation of safety-critical and mission-critical software systems in robotics and autonomous vehicles. He previously completed his MASc thesis, which proposed a novel approach to formal verification of computational digital logic systems, under the supervision of Prof. Karen Rudie and Dr. Jana Dunfield.
Nick serves as a voting member of the Smith Engineering Faculty Board (graduate student representative, effective September 2025), the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (PhD student representative), and the Queen’s VEX U Robotics Team Board of Advisors.

Nastaran Kianersi is a MASc student in Computer Engineering at Queen’s University. She has a strong interest in monitoring and safety-critical systems engineering. Her current research project focuses on specification mining and automata learning, where she is modeling the behavior of a domestic heat pump using its sensor logs collected over time. She holds a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and has four years of experience working as a software developer at Sunyar Co. in Iran and NextIO B.V. in the Netherlands.

Amir Shetaia is a MASc. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen’s University, working in the Kauffman Lab for Safety-Critical Software Engineering (CritLab) under Dr. Sean Kauffman. With a background in Mechatronics Engineering from Mansoura University and experience in Embedded Systems, Robotics, and AI, he is currently focused on bridging the gap between Large Language Models (LLMs) and Runtime Verification to enhance the reliability of systems. His journey includes leadership roles in robotics education, internships at top tech companies like Huawei, Valeo, and Siemens, and recognition with First Prize in the Cloud Track at the Huawei ICT Competition Global Final, held in Shenzhen, China.

Chloe Miklaucic just graduated with a BASc in computer engineering and will be starting her MASc in fall 2025, both at Queen’s University. She will be joining the Safety-Critical Software Engineering lab (CritLab) supervised by Dr. Sean Kauffman and the Computing At Extreme Scale Advanced Research lab (CAESAR) supervised by Dr. Ryan Grant. Chloe hopes to work on verification strategies on varying computer architectures to increase adaptability and accessibility of formal verification implementation. She has previously taken on a multitude of leadership roles around campus including Orientation Chair and Director of Governance for the Engineering Society. Chloe hopes to continue to explore her creativity and love for everything engineering in this next phase in research.

Nikola Zupancic is an Undergradute Student in Computer Engineering at Queen’s University, investigating the use of extended Berkely Packet Filters (eBPF) for monitoring and profiling under the supervision of Dr. Sean Kauffman and Dr. Thomas Dean. Nikola has interests in Cybersecurity, Systems Programming, and Reverse Engineering. Having founded the Queen’s CTF (Capture the Flag) club, Nikola has competed in CTFs such as Cybersci and NCC-CTF representing Queen’s University.

Walker Yee is an undergraduate student in Computer Engineering at Queen’s University. He is currently researching the use of the C Bounded Model Checking tool to verify certain aspects of a program such as memory safety. His research interests include formal methods, and the verification and safety of software systems. Outside of research, Walker enjoys spending time outdoors and playing soccer.

Nafiz Sadman is a Ph.D. candidate in Queen’s School of Computing supervised by Prof. Farhana Zulkernine. Nafiz specializes in vision-language models and explainable AI for medical imaging and text analytics. He loves to create meaningful visualization out of data.

Thomas Møller Grosen studied software engineering, and afterwards a PhD in computer science, at Aalborg University in Denmark. His PhD study is mainly in applying knowledge of timed automata theory to implement monitoring algorithms for timed properties. During Thomas’ PhD study he had the opportunity to stay in Canada and work at CritLab. Here, he got to see the sights of eastern Ontario and study the fundamentals of monitorability problems in a timed setting.