Cătălin Hrițcu is a tenured faculty at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) where he leads the Formally Verified Security group. He is also an Adjunct Professor (APL) in the Faculty of Computer Science of Ruhr Uni Bochum (RUB), as well as a member of HGI and the CASA Cluster of Excellence at RUB. Before joining MPI-SP, Catalin was a Tenured Researcher at Inria Paris, a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, and a PostDoc at University of Pennsylvania. He received a PhD from Saarland University and a Habilitation from ENS Paris.

Catalin is interested in formal methods for security (secure compilation, compartmentalization, memory safety, speculative execution defenses, information flow control, security protocols), programming languages (program verification, machine-checked proofs, dependent types, formal semantics, property-based testing), and the design and verification of security-critical systems (compilation chains, reference monitors, tagged hardware architectures, high-assurance crypto). He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant on formally secure compilation and was also involved in the design of the F* verification system, which received a Most Influential POPL Paper Award from SIGPLAN in 2026. Catalin’s research also received Distinguished Paper Awards at the Computer Security Foundations (CSF) symposium in 2019, 2021, and 2025.