PD Dr.-Ing. Thomas Santen has founded Formal Assurance in 2018.

Dr. Santen has more than 30 years of experience in research and application of formal methods, software engineering and the development of safety and security-critical, dependable systems. He has worked with companies from the automotive, railway, utility and embedded-systems sectors.

Dr. Santen's experience in formal methods includes system and software specification in Alloy, B, Z, and CSP, verification of system requirements using model checking (NuSMV, FDR) and deductive verification methods (Isabelle/HOL). He contributed to the ISO/IEC standard of the specification language Z.

During his 8+ year tenure at Microsoft, he lead an R&D team and served as Deputy Director of the European Microsoft Innovation Center in Aachen, Germany. His team developed the Microsoft Verifier for Concurrent C (VCC). VCC has been used to formally verify C code of the kernel of Hyper-V, Microsoft's virtualization product.

Dr. Santen has published research papers on formal methods, model-based development, functional safety, and IT security in peer-reviewed scientific journals and conferences. He regularly serves at program committees of conferences and reviews submissions to scientific journals.

Dr. Santen holds a Ph. D. and a State Doctorate (Habilitation) of TU Berlin, where he is Privatdozent and teaches formal methods at the Master level.