Sam Blackshear is the Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at Mysten Labs, the company behind the Sui blockchain. He is also credited as the creator of the Move programming language. ^[1]

Education

Sam Blackshear has a Bachelor's in Computer Science, Philosophy from Williams College and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Programming Language from the University of Colorado Boulder.^[2]

Career

As of January 2024, Sam Blackshear has held the position of Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Mysten Labs since November 2021.

Before joining Mysten Labs, Sam served as a Principal Engineer at Meta from October 2015 to November 2021. During his time at Meta, he participated in the creation of the Move language and was actively involved in projects related to the Libra/Diem platform. Additionally, he focused on static analysis for security, performance, and bug identification as part of the Infer team.

Preceding his role at Meta, Sam worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Colorado from August 2010 to May 2015. He also gained industry experience as a Research Intern at Facebook in London, England from May 2014 to August 2014. Furthermore, Sam undertook research internships at Microsoft, spending 3 months each in Redmond, WA, in June 2012 and in Bangalore, India, in June 2011.^[2][1]

Publications

Sam Blackshear has made notable contributions to various publications. In 2023, he co-authored works on blockchain security and modern blockchain programming. His involvement in 2022 included "The Move Borrow Checker." The year 2021 saw publications on blockchain security, and in 2020, he presented on language abstraction for money safety.
In 2018, Sam played a key role in "RacerD: compositional static race detection." His 2015 contributions encompassed control-flow abstraction and Android framework modeling. In 2014, he focused on Android app consistency and verification modulo versions. In 2013, his work involved modular semantic frameworks. In 2011, Sam contributed to a study on the precision of Andersen's analysis, and in 2010, he co-authored a paper on randomizing key distribution for enhanced security.^[7]