Matthew Sotoudeh

Questions about my offering of 161 this summer? Check out the website!

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PhD candidate at Stanford University

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Bachelor's degree from the University of California, Davis with majors in Mathematics and Computer Science

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I am fortunate to have been advised at various levels of formality by too many people to name, however the list of recent formal advisors is short enough to fit on a webpage:
Prof. Dawson Engler (PhD advisor),
Prof. Aditya Thakur (BS advisor),
Prof. Clark Barrett (PhD rotation advisor),
Dr. Jason Knight (Intel AIPG),
Dr. Sara Baghsorkhi (Intel Labs).

Beyond my classroom teaching, I have had the opportunity to work with Sophie Andrews (now full-time Apple) whose research on speeding up bounded model checking was recently accepted for publication at DATE 2025.

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Conference & Journal Papers

questions? thoughts? complaints? ideas? email me

Other Writings and Posters

Presentations

Honors, Awards, Grants, etc.

Teaching & Service

Here's a summary of some recent postsecondary teaching and community service roles I've had:

For some of the courses I have written day-long lab activites that introduce students to program analysis and automated reasoning in a hands-on activity. You can find most of these in this git repo.

I'm generally happy to write supporting letters of recommendation for former students in classes where I was one of the primary instructors (i.e., not just a CA; currently this means CS 343S and CS 161). Please reach out to me at least a month in advance of the deadline. Keep in mind that letters from non-faculty instructors (myself!) will likely have little impact. I also have a blanket policy of only writing letters when the FERPA rights have been waived (i.e., it will remain private).


I also love teaching K-12 students, though I'm never good about making regular time to do so.

If you are in the Palo Alto area with an interest in teaching and enough free time, I had a wonderful quarter working with DreamCatchers and would recommend it as a great opportunity to volunteer with a local middle school after-school program.

If you're at UC Davis, I took the first two MAST/CalTeach hands-on K-12 teaching courses. They're a really unique opportunity to get hands-on experience teaching in K-12.

In 2016 and 2017 two friends and I ran a middle school summer program that included a course on programming in an assembly-like language for the browser (YAEPL: Yet Another Educational Programming Language) that I designed. Most of the materials for that course, including presentations, lesson outlines, projects, and retrospective comments are available here. Code for the YAEPL interpreter and interactive editor (including an interface for students to make a hangman game!) are split across here, here, and here. You can read more about our summer program in the Mercury News.

Contact

My permanent email address is matthew@masot.net. If you are considering sending me an email, please do so!

Sometimes I make embarassing mistakes in my personal email setup and emails sent to that address disappear; it's often more reliable to email (or at least CC) sotoudeh@stanford.edu in emails sent to me.

Also, I use pretty crude filtering to remove the vast majority of spam I receive. If you are a real human, and you are sending me personally an email, and I have not replied to your email, please know that I really do want to receive and read it, but you might need to rewrite it to be less spammy and resend it before it arrives in my inbox. If you commonly send spam to mailing lists I subscribe to, your email address itself might be blocked. Please try sending from a different address.

To help real humans who want to send me real messages, I publish my filtering script here. Please don't evade the spirit of this gesture or I'll have to stop publishing these.

None of those accounts are entirely managed by me, so it would be prudent to assume any communications sent to those addresses may be viewed surreptitiously by others. You are encouraged to use my PGP Key if this concerns you.

really really, email me !

Call for Help!

At Stanford I've run a few "Linux Install Day" events to help undergraduates learn about, start using, and get help with free software. I've found it helps a lot to have old laptops there for students to try out Linux in a separate environment before "taking the plunge" and installing it on their own computers. If you have any old laptops that you're willing to donate (or sell for "used Chromebook prices"), I can help them find a happy home with an undergraduate here. Please reach out.

(Conversely, if you're a community member at Stanford reading this and interested in free software: reach out!)

Pronouncing my Names

I'm pretty adamant about the fact that you should say my name however it most naturally rolls off the tongue for you. If you're particularly curious, I think the following is closeish to how recent ancestors 2 or 3 generations back would have pronounced my first and last names:

Here are some other variations I've enjoyed:

Other

You can find a variety of projects on my git lair and GitHub profile, ranging from add-ons for Google Docs to transpilers. Please note that I try to respond to crawlers that ignore robots.txt pretty aggressively, so if you live in a region that causes you to share IP blocks with such bad actors (especially ByteSpider), there is a chance your IP address is explicitly banned. In such unfortunate cases, I am happy to unblock your IP if you send me an email.

I used to collect a list of interesting proofs.

This page was last updated on 6/11/2026.