About me

Hello! My name is Kesha, and I’m an Applied Scientist in the Automated Reasoning in Identity Group at Amazon AWS. I’m interested in compilers, program analysis and formal verification. I got my PhD in 2022 in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, where I was advised by Mike Hicks. I did my undergraduate in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota.

For my dissertation, I designed and implemented SQIR, a small quantum intermediate representation embedded in the Coq proof assistant, and VOQC, a verified optimizer for quantum circuits. You can learn more about SQIR and VOQC in this blog post, or you can check out my dissertation.

At Amazon, I work on the Cedar authorization language.

In my free time, I enjoy include puzzles, painting, and spending time with my three cats and husband, Thomas Rolinger.