Frank Pfenning

Frank Pfenning is a professor of computer science, adjunct professor in the department of philosophy, and head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. from the Carnegie Mellon University Department of Mathematics in 1987, for his dissertation entitled Proof Transformations in Higher-Order Logic. He was a student of Peter B. Andrews.

His research includes work in the area of programming languages, logic and type theory, logical frameworks, automated deduction, and trustworthy computing. He is one of the principal authors of the Twelf system. He also developed Carnegie Mellon's introductory imperative programming course for undergraduates and the C0 programming language used in this course.

In 2015 he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to the logical foundations of automatic theorem proving and types for programming languages."

He is a competitive squash player, ranked in the top four of the university's squash ladder.