Rachit Nigam

Education

Ph.D, Computer Science
Cornell University
Thesis: Modular Abstractions for Efficient Hardware Design
09/18–05/25
B.Sc., Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Thesis: Execution Control for JavaScript, Distinction with Highest Honors
09/15–05/18

Experience

Assistant Professor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)
01/26
Visiting Scholar
Jane Street
Ultra Low Latency Team
01/25–12/25
Research Intern
Facebook Reality Labs
Silicon Design team
05/19–09/19
Software Engineering Intern
Google
Web Infrastructure team
05/18–09/18

Students

Elam Day-Friedland, PhD, NSF GRFP Fellow
2025
Carolyn Zech, PhD, NSF GRFP Fellow
2025
Ayana Alemayehu, M.Eng
2025

Honors & Awards

Outstanding CS Dissertation Award, Cornell
2026
John C. Reynolds Distinguished Dissertation, SIGPLAN
2025
Outstanding Dissertation Award (Hon. Mention), IEEE / ACM
2025
Distinguished Artifact Award, ASPLOS
2023
Jane Street Fellowship, Jane Street
2023
Departmental Nominee, Google Fellowship
2020
Finalist, Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship
2020
Outstanding Teaching Assistant, Cornell CIS
2019
Dean's Merit Scholarship, University of Massachusetts Amherst
2018
Honors Research Fellowship, University of Massachusetts Amherst
2017
Chancellor's Scholarship, University of Massachusetts Amherst
2015

Service

Program Committee • PLDI 25, MICRO 26, ASPLOS 26
Reviewer • YArch 26, ACM SRC Grand Finals 26
Panelist • PLMW @ PLDI 25, MIT PL Review 26
Student Research Competition Co-Chair • PLDI 24, PLDI 25
External Review Committee • OOPSLA 23, PLDI 26, POPL 26
Workshop Co-Organizer • LATTE 21, LATTE 22, LATTE 23, LATTE 24, LATTE 25, LATTE 26
Social Chair • PLDI 21, PLDI 22, PLDI 23, PLDI 26
Sub-reviewer • ISCA 21
Artifact Evaluation Committee • PLDI 19, OOPSLA 20, PLDI 20, OOPSLA 23
Volunteer • SPLASH 18

Publications

Dissertation

Modular Abstractions for Efficient Hardware Design. Rachit Nigam.

Conference Publications

Parameterized Hardware Design with Latency-Abstract Interfaces. Rachit Nigam, Ethan Gabizon, Edmund Lam, Carolyn Zech, Jonathan Balkind, Adrian Sampson. In ASPLOS 2026.
Unifying Static and Dynamic Intermediate Languages for Accelerator Generators. Caleb Kim, Pai Li, Anshuman Mohan, Andrew Butt, Adrian Sampson, Rachit Nigam. In OOPSLA 2024.
Modular Hardware Design with Timeline Types. Rachit Nigam, Pedro Henrique Azevedo de Amorim, Adrian Sampson. In PLDI 2023.
Stepwise Debugging for Hardware Accelerators. Griffin Berlstein, Rachit Nigam, Chris Gyurgyik, Adrian Sampson. In ASPLOS 2023.
A Compiler Infrastructure for Accelerator Generators. Rachit Nigam, Samuel Thomas, Zhijing Li, Adrian Sampson. In ASPLOS 2021.
Vectorization for Digital Signal Processors via Equality Saturation. Alexa VanHattum, Rachit Nigam, Vincent Lee, James Bornholt, Adrian Sampson. In ASPLOS 2021.
Predictable Accelerator Design with Time-Sensitive Affine Types. Rachit Nigam, Sachille Atapattu, Samuel Thomas, Zhijing Li, Ted Bauer, Yuwei Ye, Apurva Koti, Adrian Sampson, Zhiru Zhang. In PLDI 2020.
Putting in All the Stops: Execution Control for JavaScript. Sam Baxter, Rachit Nigam, Joe Gibbs Politz, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Arjun Guha. In PLDI 2018.

Short Papers

Defining Safe Hardware Design. Rachit Nigam. In LATTE 2026.
From ‘Why?’ to ‘WAT!’: Explaining perplexing programs by debugging mental models. Kartik Chandra, Tzu-Mao Li, Rachit Nigam, Joshua Tenenbaum, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley. In PLATEAU 2024.
A Toolkit for Designing Hardware DSLs. Griffin Berlstein, Rachit Nigam, Chris Gyurgyik, Adrian Sampson. In WOSET 2021.
A Synthesis-Aided Compiler for DSP Architectures (WiP paper). Alexa VanHattum, Rachit Nigam, Vincent Lee, James Bornholt, Adrian Sampson. In LCTES 2020.
Fission: Secure Dynamic Code-Splitting for JavaScript. Arjun Guha, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, Rachit Nigam, Rian Shambaugh, Jane Tangen. In SNAPL 2017.