Emery is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He researches languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance. Emery and friends have created Hoard, the first scalable memory manager (malloc), on which the Mac OS X memory manager is based; DieHard, an error-avoiding memory manager that directly influenced the design of the Windows 7 Fault-Tolerant Heap; DieHarder, a secure memory manager that was an inspiration for hardening changes made to the Windows 8 heap; the Coz profiler, which ships with modern Linux distros; and more. He was named an ACM Fellow in 2019.