We’re delighted to announce that Katalin Fazekas won a highly competitive Amazon Research Award in the 2025 fall cycle for her project PASSAT: Improved Passing of Assertion Stacks to SAT in Incremental SMT Solvers!

Katalin is an Assistant Professor in the Research Unit Formal Methods in Systems Engineering at the Institute of Logic and Computation. Her research focuses on improving incremental reasoning methods in SAT and SMT solvers to advance formal verification techniques, with a broader interest in the theoretical and practical algorithms underlying MaxSAT and QBF solvers. Previously, she was a Hertha Firnberg Fellow at TU Wien and a Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley. Katalin obtained their PhD from the Johannes Kepler University Linz under the supervision of Armin Biere.

Congratulations to Katalin on this outstanding achievement!

About Amazon Research Awards

Amazon Research Awards (ARA) provide unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating various research topics in multiple disciplines. In the fall 2025 cycle, 6 calls for proposals were funded in AI for Information Security, Agentic AI, Automated Reasoning, AWS Cryptography, Cybersecurity and Anti-Abuse Technologies, and Sustainability. Recipients have access to more than 700 Amazon public datasets and can utilize AWS AI/ML services and tools through their AWS Promotional Credits. Recipients are also assigned an Amazon research contact who offers consultation and advice, along with opportunities to participate in Amazon events and training sessions. This cycle, ARA announced 68 award recipients representing universities in 15 countries.

Curious about our other news? Subscribe to our news feed, calendar, or newsletter, or follow us on social media.