Kris Brown
Kris Brown was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab from 2021 to 2022, arriving from a PhD in Chemical Engineering at Stanford. His work sits at the point where category theory has to become an algorithm: given a categorical specification, what does a program that implements it actually do, and how fast?
That question runs through his contributions to AlgebraicJulia. He is the largest contributor to Catlab.jl, the library the rest of the ecosystem is built on, and to GATlab.jl, which turns generalized algebraic theories into something you can compute with rather than only write down. He also worked on ACSets.jl, the data structure underneath most of the lab’s modelling tools.
His paper on computational category-theoretic rewriting, with Evan Patterson, Tyler Hanks and James Fairbanks, won best paper at ICGT 2022 and set out how double-pushout rewriting can be implemented efficiently over attributed C-sets — the operation that makes model transformation in AlgebraicJulia practical rather than theoretical.
He is now a Research Software Engineer at the Topos Institute.