This talk discusses mental health in the programming languages research community. It takes a very programming languages view on your mental health, looking in particular at the interaction between you and the environment you exist within. For example, many students found themselves mentally ill for the first time during the pandemic—in a better world and better environment, perhaps the same people would have been mentally healthy. Still, take two people and place them in the same environment, and you may well find that one is mentally healthy while the other is not. This talk focuses on both the individual and environmental factors behind mental illness in the community, and describes both individual and environmental strategies for improving mental health. It concludes with a discussion of enacting systemic change within the community to improve the environment not just for yourself, but for everyone who comes after you.

The following are safety plans recommended by the speaker during the talk: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Brown_StanleySafetyPlanTemplate.pdf

I am an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My main interest is in making program verification using interactive theorem provers more accessible through better proof engineering tools and practices, especially when it comes to maintaining proofs as programs change over time. My vision is a future of verification that is accessible to all programmers, not just to experts. I got my Ph.D. from University of Washington in June 2021, where I was an NSF GRFP fellow and a P.E.O fellow. Prior to graduate school, I earned my bachelor’s in mathematics and computer science from University of Maryland, then worked at Amazon as a software engineer for three years. I am the founder and chair of the SIGPLAN-M mentoring program, and a contributor to the Coq interactive theorem prover.

Oh, and I am currently looking for students! Please apply!