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
Conditionally Accepted to POPL 2026

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

[ 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: Fall 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

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.