Announcing the RustConf 2026 Program Committee

The Rust Foundation is excited to introduce the RustConf 2026 Program Committee – a fantastic group of global community members who will help shape the content and direction of this year’s conference.

The 2026 Committee brings together representatives from five continents. Each member will contribute their distinct experience and perspective to help create an engaging, well-balanced program that reflects how Rust is used, taught, and advanced around the world.

The RustConf 2026 Call For Talk Proposals (CFP) is open now, and our program committee can’t wait to see what you’ll share!
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>>Submit through February 16.

Meet the Committee Members

Jakub Beránek

Jakub is a member of the Rust Infrastructure and Compiler teams and currently represents the Infrastructure team on the Leadership Council. In the Rust Project, he is usually working on improving various bots, CI infrastructure, or the performance of the Rust compiler. Apart from that, he teaches Rust at a university and leads Rust trainings.

Lisa Crossman

Lisa is a senior bioinformatician with a PhD and a strong research track record in microbial genomics and data science. After a Rust Project Grant, she founded the open source microBioRust, to bring blazing fast Rust to bioinformatics programming with accessible tools for scientists. She works as consultant and technical Director at SequenceAnalysis.co.uk and Phylonoe. Her work intersects research, teaching, and innovation, with a growing focus on AI, digital health, and sustainable scientific software.  

Alex Celeste

Alex is Elder Witch of the C Compiler at Perforce Software, where she is maintainer of the C and Rust components for the QAC static analyzer toolchain. She is a member of the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium, Guidelines team; FLS team; and SCRC Liaison to other working groups. Alex is also active in the C Community in ISO WG14 and the MISRA C Working Group, and is interested in promoting language interoperability and compatibility between C and Rust.

Hernán Gabriel González

Hernan is the founder of the Oxidar organisation, a space dedicated to growing Rust awareness in Latin America, and a co-organiser of the Rust Argentina meet-up. He is currently working as a Senior Staff Software Engineer at a large Fintech, with former experience in the Social Media, Gaming, and Travel industries.

Conrad Ludgate

Conrad is a software engineer at Databricks currently working on Postgres proxy services using Rust. He is known to work on all things async and cryptography, with over 7 years of experience with writing Rust.

Adefemi Adeoye

Adefemi is an editor at This Week in Rust (TWiR), and backend engineer, working at the intersection of Rust, open-source and event-driven systems.

Aida Getoeva

Coming from a purely C/C++ background, Aida was lucky enough to be a part of the team building the first large Rust project at Meta and a state-of-the-art source control server. She’s written old-school futures and seen “impossible” runtime issues, implemented async C++/Rust FFI, and debugged segfaults. 

Jacob Pratt

Jacob is a senior software engineer who has worked with Rust since 2016. He maintains the time crate, reviews PRs for the Rust standard library, and has contributed to the Rust compiler.

Lori Lorusso

Lori is the Rust Foundation’s Director of Outreach and has a deep passion and enthusiasm for working with developers and the open source community. She is an active member of multiple open source foundations, such as CNCF, CDF, OpenSSF, and DoK, and has volunteered as a program committee member for multiple tech conferences around the world.

Adam Harvey

Adam is a security-focused software developer at the Rust Foundation, working on ecosystem security, especially around improving crate supply chain security, and is also a member of the crates.io team.

How the Committee Was Formed

Our primary goal for the Program Committee was to reflect a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives.

• Four members were directly invited by the Rust Foundation to serve on the committee, based on past experience with RustConf, Rust event organizing, and general knowledge of the global Rust community.
• Four members were selected through a self-nomination process shared with the Rust Project on their Zulip chat channel.
• The final two seats are filled by employees of the Rust Foundation with particular knowledge of what will excite RustConf attendees.

We were thrilled by the response to the self-nomination form and received a strong pool of applications—more than anticipated. While this enthusiasm for RustConf 2026 was exciting to see, it also meant that we couldn’t accept all applicants for this year’s committee. Final selections were based on the overall balance of the group rather than the strength of any individual application. We are grateful to everyone who applied and hope many will consider a role on a future committee.

Thank You to Our Volunteers!

Serving on the RustConf Program Committee is a significant commitment, and we are grateful to each member for volunteering their time and expertise. Reviewing and scoring a large number of submissions, discussing them as a group, and making difficult decisions about program fit takes considerable care and effort.

Jakub Beránek shared what motivated him to serve on the committee:

“I am always eager to watch talks from as many Rust conferences as possible, as I find it fascinating to see what people are doing with Rust in the real world, and also what sorts of ideas they have to improve the language and its ecosystem. I find it truly inspiring. Being on the RustConf committee seemed like a great opportunity to help put a spotlight on Rust topics that would be interesting to the wider Rust community.”

The Call for Talk Proposals is Open

With the Program Committee in place, we are looking forward to reviewing this year’s RustConf session proposals. The Call for Proposals (CFP) is open through February 16, and we encourage community members from all backgrounds and experience levels to submit their ideas.

If you have a story to share, a lesson learned, or an idea that could benefit the wider Rust community, we would love to hear from you. RustConf thrives on the creativity and generosity of its speakers, and we can’t wait to see what you propose for 2026.

Stay Tuned For More RustConf Updates!

RustConf 2026 is taking place from September 8-11 in Montreal, Canada, and is hosted by the Rust Foundation. We hope to see you there! 

We’re excited to share more about RustConf over the coming months, including speaker announcements, schedule publication, registration, and much more. 

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