Professor Felleisen is interested in all aspects of programming languages and some aspects of software design. With his PhD students, he investigates the nature and application of software contracts, the design of type systems for scripting languages, and the use of syntactic abstractions on a large scale.
In 1995, Felleisen launched the TeachScheme! Project, reaching out to high schools with a radically novel computing curriculum. It is the longest-running outreach project in the country and, to this day, offers intensive summer workshops for school teachers and college faculty.
Both Felleisen’s research and his outreach projects involve PLT, a large, loosely coupled research group that he founded while at Rice University. The group jointly maintains PLT Scheme and supports others who wish to use a language outside of the mainstream.
Felleisen is the 2012 recipient of the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) Lifetime Achievement Award as well as its Most Influential Paper Award. The ACM Lifetime Achievement Award goes to an individual who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the field.
