Ben Wooding

Ben Wooding

I am a postdoctoral researcher working in Taylor T. Johnson’s group. My research sits at the intersection of formal methods, machine learning and cyber-physical systems, with the goal of providing provable guarantees for how systems and models behave. These include, but are not limited to: robustness to perturbations, stability, safety, resilience, reachability, invariance, and fairness; both worst-case and probabilistic guarantees, and for systems with known or (aleatoric/epistemic) uncertain models.

I am a lead author of the open-source tools IMPaCT, PRoTECT, and TRUST, a contributor to NNV3 and n2v, and co-lead of the AINNCS category of the ARCH-COMP verification competition. I completed my PhD in formal methods for cyber-physical systems at Newcastle University in 2023, supervised by Sadegh Soudjani, and went on to hold an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Research Fellowship on reliable AI-enabled design of cyber-physical systems. During the fellowship, I was invited to present my research at several international universities.

I have contributed to the international academic community with published works, conference presentations, program committee memberships, and paper reviews. I am publicity chair for VNN-COMP 2026, a Program Committee member for FMAS 2026, and I contributed to a AAAI tutorial. Published works of particular note are conference works at ADHS, ATVA, CDC, ECC, HSCC, ICCPS, ICTAC, NeuS, QEST+FORMATS, SAIV, and the ARCH Competition, and journal works in NAHS and ES:WR&T. I contributed two chapters to the book Active Building Energy Systems: Operation and Control.

At Vanderbilt University, I have given a couple lectures for the Advanced Graduate Course: Automated Verification (CS6315). I attended the Academy of College Teaching (ACT 2026S) workshop series to prepare for college level teaching, and the Postdoctoral Mentoring Skills Workshop at Vanderbilt University. I have worked on the DAINS (Dependable AI for National Security) project, collaborating with the Air Force Research Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

At Newcastle University, I was the chair of AMBER (involved coordinating regular seminars), gave multiple internal research presentations, and assisted widely by teaching as a demonstrator and with marking. I have experience with supervising PhD, MSc and BSc student projects. Alongside these, I previously led the team for research communication and dissemination for the HyCoDeV Lab.

I completed an integrated Masters degree in Computer Science (Security and Resilience) with 1st Class Honours (2019) also at Newcastle University. For the project and dissertation, I received 92%.

I completed my PhD in formal methods for cyber-physical systems at Newcastle University in 2023, supervised by Sadegh Soudjani, and went on to hold an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Research Fellowship on reliable AI-enabled design of cyber-physical systems. I completed an integrated Masters degree in Computer Science (Security and Resilience) with 1st Class Honours (2019) also at Newcastle University. For the project and dissertation, I received 92%.