He was the principal investigator on the multi-year NSF/College Board project that led to the release of the AP Computer Science Principles course and exam.
His thesis work was with Donald W. Loveland on automated theorem proving using model elimination.
[1] He spent the summer of 1991 as a research assistant at SRI International in Menlo Park, California working on automated theorem proving with Mark E.
[1] For four years, from 1990 to 1993, he and other graduate students ran the first distributed, internet-based programming contest.
It was inspired by the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest but open to a wider range of students and required no travel, only access to email.
[9] Astrachan continued his work with the AP Computer Science Development Committee.
He was part of the team developing the AP Computer Science AB and became the chief reader on that exam.