About Me

I am a second-year PhD student in the PLClub at the University of Pennsylvania, where I study type systems and language design with Benjamin Pierce and Stephanie Weirich. My research is supported by the NSF CSGrad4US Fellowship.

Previously, I worked in industry at Meta and the Flow Foundation. Before that, I did my B.S. and M.Eng. at Cornell, where I was advised by Adrian Sampson.

You can reach me at sainati@seas.upenn.edu, or take a look at my CV.

Publications

• Typing Strictness
  Daniel Sainati, Joseph W. Cutler, Benjamin C. Pierce, Stephanie Weirich
  POPL 2026 [Extended Version][Rocq Proofs]

• LambdaLab: An Interactive 𝛌‑Calculus Reducer for Learning
  Daniel Sainati, Adrian Sampson
  SPLASH‑E 2018

Drafts

• Modular GPU Programming with Typed Perspectives
  Manya Bansal, Daniel Sainati, Joseph W. Cutler, Saman Amarasinghe, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley
  Submitted

• The Search for Constrained Random Generators
  Harrison Goldstein, Hila Peleg, Cassia Torczon, Daniel Sainati, Leonidas Lampropoulos, Benjamin C. Pierce
  Submitted

Talks

• Typing Strictness
  PLDG @ Cornell, December 2025 (invited)

• Typing Strictness and Laziness with Effects and Coeffects
  NJPLS, May 2025

Teaching

Penn

• [ CIS 5000 ] Software Foundations
  • Teaching Assistant: Fall 2025

Cornell

• [ CS 6110 ] Advanced Programming Langauges
  • Teaching Assistant: Spring 2018
• [ CS 4810 ] Introduction to Theory of Computing
  • Teaching Assistant: Fall 2017
• [ CS 3152 ] Introduction to Computer Game Development
  • Teaching Assistant: Spring 2017
• [ CS 3110 ] Data Structures and Functional Programming
  • Head Teaching Assistant: Fall 2016
  • Teaching Assistant: Fall 2015, Spring 2016
• [ CS 2110 ] Object‑Oriented Programming and Data Structures
  • Consultant: Spring 2015

Other Work

• I wrote some lecture notes about type and effect systems for a lecture I taught in Penn’s type systems course (CIS 6700).

• At Meta, I worked on the Flow type checker for JavaScript. At one point I wrote a blog post about it.

• At Flow, I worked on the Cadence smart contract programming language. Some contributions here that I am particularly proud of are Entitlements and Attachments.

• In undergrad, some classmates and I released a mobile game called Underhand. We haven’t maintained it at all, and at some point it was delisted from the Apple Store, but if you’re interested you can probably figure out a way to emulate it.