George Karachalias

He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.

Kahlil Gibran

About me

I am a software engineer and researcher currently working with Tweag. My research interests lie in the area of programming language design and implementation, with a strong focus on purely functional languages. However, I firmly believe that functional programming does not pertain to specific programming languages or technologies, but that it is a methodology and a way of thinking that can be applied to software independently of the programming language or tools of choice.

In my free time I enjoy reading books, writing poetry, climbing, discovering music, carving smoking pipes, and hiking in nature with my partner and our adorable dog; we love things that grow, so most of the time we surround ourselves with plants and trees!

Past Activities

In 2018 I obtained my Ph.D. from KU Leuven, where I worked with Prof. Tom Schrijvers on extensions to type classes and pattern match checking. After that, I continued working with Tom as a PostDoc, doing research on PL-related topics (type-and-effect systems, disjoint intersection types, ...), before finally joining Tweag with an aspiration to apply my knowledge to real-life problems. In the distant past I graduated from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, where I worked with Prof. Nikolaos Papaspyrou on the exhaustiveness checking of pattern matching with GADTs.