January 30, 2025
ISTA Welcomes Three Faculty Members
Samara Ren, Michael Sammler, and Latha Venkataraman join the ISTA faculty
From verifying software and programs for bugs to designing and fabricating geometric structures to unveiling matter’s properties at an atomic scale, the new faculty members at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) showcase the breadth of the Institute’s research areas. Ranging from rising stars to established experts, Assistant Professors Samara Ren and Michael Sammler and Professor Latha Venkataraman will add new expertise to the growing Institute and help expand its multidisciplinary research activities.
True to the interdisciplinary spirit of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), the research of the three new faculty members lies at the intersection of various fields, actively blurring the boundaries between traditional disciplines. Assistant Professor Samara Ren’s research interests are where geometry meets computer science and digital fabrication. On the other hand, Assistant Professor Michael Sammler uses formal mathematical methods to verify real-world computer programs and ensure their reliability and security. As a new member of the ISTA senior faculty, Professor Latha Venkataraman will add to the Institute with her recognized expertise in combining physics, chemistry, and engineering to understand matter at the nanoscale.
Structures and shapes with intricate geometric details
Leading the Geometric Computing and Digital Fabrication group at ISTA, Samara Ren creates shape-morphing—deployable—structures with intricate details. Using geometry, physics-based simulation, and numerical optimization, she develops computational methods to design structures with complex shapes and properties. Ren’s fabricated geometries target applications in medical devices, architecture, and soft robotics.

Ren received dual mathematics and computer science degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA, in 2019. The Chinese researcher joined ISTA in the fall of 2024 at the age of 26 shortly after completing her PhD in Computer Science at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. During her PhD, she was also a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Toronto. Among her numerous awards is the Rising Stars in Computer Graphics award in 2023 and the Doctoral Thesis Distinction by EPFL in 2024. Ren was also the winner of the SciFilmIt Hackathon, Lausanne 2021.
Formally proving computer systems are bug-free
In his research group at ISTA, Programming Languages and Verification, Michael Sammler will develop methodologies to verify real-world computer programs against formal models of programming languages. This approach—called “formal verification”—proves that a software system or program behaves according to mathematical specifications. Sammler’s research will ultimately make computers more reliable by ensuring that operating systems and other software are free of bugs.

Sammler joined the ISTA faculty in January 2025 at the age of 29, following a postdoc at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He benefited from a Google PhD Fellowship during his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in his home country, Germany, obtaining his doctoral degree in computer science from Saarland University in 2023. Sammler’s publications earned him numerous awards at several international conferences. These include multiple Distinguished Paper Awards and Distinguished Artifact Awards at international conferences like the 2022 and 2023 symposia on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) and the 2021 and 2024 Programming Language Design & Implementation (PLDI) meetings. In addition, he received the Dr. Eduard Martin Prize for his thesis and was runner-up for the Informatics Europe 2024 Best Dissertation Award. Sammler also worked in the industrial sector on multiple occasions. During his undergraduate studies, he was a Software Engineer at SIEMENS / PRIMETALS and Senacor Technologies. During his PhD, he was a Verification Engineering Intern at BedRock Systems and a Research Intern at Google.
Single molecules in circuits and properties of devices—at the atomic scale
Latha Venkataraman’s group, Single-Molecule Physics and Chemistry, is at the forefront of exploring and controlling single molecules as active functional components of electronic circuits and pushing the boundaries of devices to the smallest possible dimension—the atomic scale. Using an interdisciplinary approach, her team engineers advanced tools to create and study the properties of structures called “single-molecule junctions,” where a single molecule is connected to two metal electrodes. Venkataraman works in collaboration with synthetic chemists and theoretical physicists, contributing knowledge that helps advance fundamental chemical structures and theoretical models of solid matter. Her work has also helped shed light on how metals and organic molecules interact and transfer charge, thus helping drive forward organic electronics, photovoltaics, catalysis, and charge transfer in biology.

When Venkataraman joined the ISTA faculty in January 2025, she had already reached great heights in her illustrious scientific career. She now moved from New York to Austria following over 20 years of research and leadership at Columbia University. Having obtained her PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1999, and following a Research Scientist position at Vytran Corporation, she joined Columbia University as a Research Scientist before becoming part of its faculty. In 2016, she became Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Applied Physics and served as a Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs from 2019 to 2022. In 2019, she was named Lawrence Gussman Professor of Applied Physics. Venkataraman received a plethora of awards and honors, including joining the American Physical Society as a Fellow in 2015 and receiving the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2023. The same year, she was also a Satish Dhawan IoE Visiting Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Furthermore, Venkataraman served on the Editorial Advisory Boards of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Chemical Science, and ACS Physical Chemistry Au and is an Associate Editor for Nano Letters.
With the Ren, Sammler, and Venkataraman groups now established at ISTA, the Institute is well on its way to achieving its goal of becoming home to 150 active research groups by 2036. With these valuable additions to its faculty, ISTA continues to foster interdisciplinarity and provide a fertile ground for distinction in broad areas of basic research, highlighting research promise and excellence as the key criteria for its faculty appointments.