Christina Giannoula will be joining the tenure-track faculty at our institute starting January 2026. She will lead the SPIN research group, and is actively seeking motivated students and researchers to join her team.

Christina's research interests lie at the intersection of computer architecture, computer systems, high-performance computing, and sustainable computing. Her current research focuses on the hardware/software co-design of emerging applications, particularly AI/ML, with modern computing systems. She designs solutions across the entire system stack, from software down to hardware—including algorithms, compilers, runtime systems, programming frameworks, and hardware engines—leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as processing-in-memory and memory disaggregation. Her work targets improvements in performance, scalability, programmability, and sustainability.

Prior to joining MPI-SWS, Christina was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Toronto, where she received several research distinctions, including Postdoctoral Research Awards from the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She was selected as a 2024 MLSys Rising Star and 2024 EECS Rising Star. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in Greece, where she was a member of the Computing Systems Laboratory. Her Ph.D. thesis received the 2022 Iakovos Gurounian Award for the Ph.D. thesis with the highest industrial impact.

Anne-Kathrin Schmuck has been appointed as new tenure-track faculty as of July 1st, 2023, after leading a prestigious externally funded Emmy-Noether research group hosted at MPI-SWS since 2020. Her group conducts fundamental research at the intersection of control engineering, cybernetics, and computer science to develop reliable and performant control software for cyber-physical systems. In particular, her work addresses the challenge of orchestrating continuous physical components and discrete logical decision making units within these highly automated and safety-critical technological systems.

Anne has been part of the MPI-SWS faculty as an independent research group leader since 2020. She holds a Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) degree in engineering cybernetics from OvGU Magdeburg, Germany and a Dr.-Ing. (Ph.D.) degree in electrical engineering from TU Berlin, Germany. She joined MPI-SWS as a postdoctoral researcher in the area of formal methods in 2015.

Mariya Toneva joins the tenure-track faculty at our institute starting September 2022. Mariya’s research is at the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing, and neuroscience. Her group bridges language in machines with language in the brain, with a focus on building computational models of language processing in the brain that can also improve natural language processing systems.

Prior to joining MPI-SWS, Mariya conducted research as a C.V. Starr Fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She received her Ph.D. in a joint program between Machine Learning and Neural Computation from Carnegie Mellon University, and her B.S. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Yale University.

Derek Dreyer, head of the Foundations of Programming research group since 2008, has been appointed as a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Scientific Director of MPI-SWS as of May 1, 2022.

Derek became known for his pioneering work in programming languages and verification, with a particular emphasis on building rigorous foundations for establishing the reliability and correctness of realistic software systems.  In recent years, he and his group have become especially well known for their work on the Iris and RustBelt verification frameworks, both implemented in the Coq proof assistant.  Developed initially in 2015, Iris is a system for developing and deploying higher-order concurrent separation logics; though only 7 years old, it has already been used in over 60 papers published in top venues in programming languages.  One of the most significant applications of Iris is RustBelt, which constitutes the first formal, machine-checked foundation for verifying the safety of the increasingly popular systems programming language Rust.  These large-scale verification efforts place Dreyer's group at the forefront of programming languages research worldwide.

Derek has received numerous accolades for his research, teaching, and service, including the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, a 2015 ERC Consolidator Grant, multiple Distinguished Paper Awards at top conferences like POPL, PLDI, and OOPSLA, the OOPSLA'18 Distinguished Reviewer Award, and most recently, the "Busy Beaver Award" at Saarland University for outstanding commitment to teaching. Under his mentorship, members of his group have also received numerous awards, including the prestigious ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award and ACM Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention Award (for Dr. Ralf Jung).

Derek was born in New York City in 1980.  He holds a Bachelor's in Mathematics and Computer Science from New York University and received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.  He joined MPI-SWS as a tenure-track faculty in January 2008, only a few years after the Institute's founding, and has been an integral member ever since. We are thus very proud to be able to retain him as a Scientific Director of the institute.

Sandra Kiefer has joined MPI-SWS as a research group leader, effective April 1, 2022. Her research interests include algorithmic and structural graph theory as well as logic in computer science, with a recent focus on the applicability of tools from these areas to the study of biochemical networks.

Sandra obtained her Ph.D. from RWTH Aachen University. For her work on combinatorial and logical approaches to graph comparison, she received the Ackermann Award 2020, the EACSL Outstanding Dissertation Award for Logic in Computer Science. After her Ph.D. studies, Sandra was a postdoctoral researcher at RWTH and at the University of Warsaw. She holds Bachelor’s degrees in Bioinformatics and Mathematics and a Master’s degree in Mathematics from Goethe University Frankfurt. She has also completed an M.Ed. degree in Mathematics and Spanish.

Antoine Kaufmann has joined the tenure-track faculty at our institute, effective October 1, 2021.  He has been a member of our faculty as a research group leader since joining MPI-SWS in August 2018.  Antoine's research centers on the interplay of software and hardware in modern systems.  He is interested in the nascent challenges in designing, implementing, and maintaining hardware-software systems for different application domains, starting with data center networking and machine learning.

Prior to joining MPI-SWS, Antoine received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and his Master's and Bachelor's degrees from ETH Zurich.

Goran Radanovic joined MPI-SWS as a research group leader on Sep 16, 2019. He is generally interested in studying AI systems, and more specifically in the design and analysis of systems with intelligent and self-interested agents. Particular topics of interest include value-aligned artificial intelligence, human-AI collaboration, and decision making systems with societally-aware utility functions. 

Prior to joining MPI-SWS, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, where he worked with Prof. David C. Parkes. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technolgy in Lausanne (EPFL), under the supervision of Prof. Boi Faltings. He obtained his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science fromthe Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb.

Filip Mazowiecki is joining us from the University of Bordeaux, where he spent the last two years as a postdoc. His research area is formal verification, the study of verifying correct functioning of systems. He is mostly interested in the theoretical analysis of models like Petri nets and weighted automata, working on fundamental questions like reachability and equivalence.

Filip obtained his PhD at the University of Warsaw on the topic of database theory. After he obtained his PhD he switched to the area of formal verification, spending almost four years as a postdoc at the Universities of Warwick, Oxford and Bordeaux.

Keon Jang has joined the institute as a tenure-track faculty member, effective February 1, 2019. Keon Jang is joining us from Google, where he has been a software engineer since 2016. He is broadly interested in network systems and currently his work focuses on network performance isolation in data-center networks.

Prior to Google, he worked on software support for on network function virtualization (NFV) at Intel Labs. He received his PhD in Computer Science from KAIST, and subsequently held a postdoctoral research position at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK.

Georg Zetzsche has joined the institute as a tenure-track faculty member, effective November 1, 2018. He is joining us from the Institut de Recherche en Informatique Fondamentale (IRIF) at Université Paris-Diderot, where he has been a postdoctoral researcher. Georg's goal is to understand which questions about program behaviors and other infinite structures can be answered efficiently.  His research focuses on issues of decidability, complexity, synthesis, and expressiveness arising in program verification and mathematics.

Georg was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratoire Spécification et Vérification (LSV) at ENS Paris-Saclay. He obtained his PhD from the University of Kaiserslautern and his Diplom degree from Universität Hamburg. For his PhD work, Georg received the EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Jonathan Mace has joined the institute as a tenure-track faculty member, effective September 1, 2018.  He is joining us from Brown University, USA, where he has completed his Ph.D. in computer science.  Jonathan's research focuses on tools, techniques, and abstractions to make it easier to develop and operate cloud distributed systems.  In particular, he is interested in making it easier to reason about and control complicated, end-to-end system behaviors at runtime.

Before starting his Ph.D., Jonathan worked for two years at IBM UK, and earned his undergraduate degree from Oxford University.  He is a recipient of the Facebook Fellowship in Distributed Systems, an SOSP Best Paper Award, and the Honorable Mention for the Dennis Ritchie Thesis Award.

Antoine Kaufmann is joining us from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he obtained his Ph.D. in computer science. His research investigates the design and implementation of efficient, scalable, and robust systems for rapidly evolving modern platforms, with a current focus on data centers. He addresses these challenges from a systems perspective, with solutions that span multiple layers of the systems stack, from operating systems through networks down to hardware, but also programming languages and applications.

Antoine joins the institute as a research group leader, effective Aug 6, 2018. Before his Ph.D., Antoine obtained his Master's and Bachelor's degree from ETH Zurich.

Maria Christakis joins the institute as a tenure-track faculty member, effective Oct 16, 2017. Maria’s goal is to develop theoretical foundations and practical tools for building more reliable and usable software and increasing developer productivity. She is mostly interested in software engineering, programming languages, and formal methods. Maria particularly likes investigating topics in automatic test generation, software verification, program analysis, and empirical software engineering. Her tools and techniques explore novel ways of writing, specifying, verifying, testing, and debugging programs in order to make them more robust while at the same time improving the user experience.

Maria joins MPI-SWS from the University of Kent, England, where she is a Lecturer at the School of Computing. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond. Maria received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich and was awarded with the ETH medal and the EAPLS Best PhD Dissertation Award. She completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.

Joel Ouaknine joins the institute's faculty as a scientific director, effective Aug 1, 2016. Joel's research interests include the automated verification of real-time, probabilistic, and infinite-state systems (e.g. model-checking algorithms, synthesis problems, complexity), logic and applications to verification, decision and synthesis problems for linear dynamical systems, automated software analysis, concurrency, and theoretical computer science.

In 2015, Joel was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant, which provides almost 2 million euros of research funding over a period of five years. He is also the recipient of the 2010 Roger Needham Award, given annually "for a distinguished research contribution in Computer Science by a UK-based researcher within ten years of his or her PhD."

Joel will join MPI-SWS from the University of Oxford, where he is a Professor of Computer Science and Fellow of St John's College. Joel holds a BSc and MSc in Mathematics from McGill University, and received his PhD in Computer Science from Oxford in 2001. He subsequently did postdoctoral work at Tulane University and Carnegie Mellon University.

We are pleased to announce that two new faculty will join MPI-SWS.

Allen Clement obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. Allen's research aims at designing and building systems that continue to work despite the myriad of things that go 'wrong' in deployed systems, including broken components, malicious adversaries, and benign race conditions. His research builds on techniques from distributed systems, security, fault tolerance, and game theory.

Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil is joining us from Cornell University, where he obtained his PhD in computer science. Cristian's research aims at developing computational frameworks that can lead to a better understanding of human social behavior, by unlocking the unprecedented potential of the large amounts of natural language data generated online. His work tackles problems related to conversational behavior, opinion mining, computational semantics and computational advertising.

We are pleased to announce that three new faculty will join MPI-SWS this fall.

Björn Brandenburg is joining us from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where he obtained his Ph.D. in computer science. Björn's research interests include multiprocessor real-time system, real-time synchronization protocols, and operating systems. Björn is the lead designer and developer of LITMUS^RT, an extension of the Linux kernel for real-time scheduling and synchronization on multicore platforms.

Deepak Garg is joining us from the Cybersecurity Lab (CyLab) at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a post-doctoral researcher. He obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department. His research interests are in the areas of computer security and privacy, formal logic and programming languages. He is specifically interested in logic-based models of secure systems and formal analysis of security properties of systems.

Ruzica Piskac is joining us from EPFL, where she has completed her Ph.D. in computer science. The goal of her research is to make software development easier and software more reliable via automated reasoning techniques. She is specifically interested in decision procedures, their combinations and applications in program verification and software synthesis.

Viktor Vafeiadis joins the institute's faculty, starting in October 2010. Viktor's research interests are in software analysis and verification, programming languages, programming logics, and concurrency.

Viktor's research contributions include inventing new concurrent program logics (RGSep & deny/guarantee); developing automated verification tools (SmallfootRG & Cave) for proving correctness properties of concurrent algorithms; and verifying some particularly challenging algorithms manually (e.g., mcas), mechanically (e.g., fast congruence closure), or automatically (e.g., lazy set).

Viktor received his B.A. degree in Computer Science in 2004 and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2008 both from the University of Cambridge. After that, he held post-doctoral research positions at Microsoft Research and at the University of Cambridge.

Rupak Majumdar joins the institute's faculty as a scientific director. Rupak's research interests are in computer-aided verification and control of reactive, real-time, hybrid, and probabilistic systems; software verification and programming languages; and logic and automata theory.

Rupak's research spans the spectrum of formal verification techniques, ranging from theoretical foundations of logic and automata theory to practical software engineering tools that systematically analyze thousands of lines of code for programmer errors. In the field of software model checking, Rupak has made major contributions. Rupak, along with Ranjit Jhala, wrote the the model checker Blast, which is able to analyze over 100,000 lines of code for complex temporal properties. This achievement was a major milestone and proof of feasibility in the field of software verification and led to a flurry of academic and industrial activity in the area.

Rupak joins MPI-SWS from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was on the faculty of the computer science department. Prior to that, Rupak received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and his B.Tech. degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur.

Robert Harper has been appointed as the institute's first external scientific member. Dr. Harper is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he conducts research on programming language design and implementation. Bob will be visiting the institute in Summer 2010.

The external scientific member appointment is a courtesy appointment, which acknowledges the member's scientific excellence, as well as his or her close collaboration and contribution to joint research projects with MPI-SWS faculty and researchers.

Robert Harper has been a professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University since 1988. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1985, and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at Edinburgh University from 1985-1988. He is best known for his work on the design, definition, and implementation of Standard ML; the design and application of the LF logical framework; the type-theoretic foundations of modularity in programming languages; the use of typed intermediate languages for certified compilation; the co-invention of self-adjusting computation for dynamic algorithms; and the application of fundamental theory to practical software systems. His current interests include mechanization of the metatheory of programming languages, the integration of types and verification, and the application of programming language theory to computer security.

Umut Acar joins the institute's faculty, starting in January 2010. Umut's research interests are in language and algorithm design and implementation, particularly for dynamic systems that interact with changing data from various sources, such as users and the physical environment.

Such systems abound in many areas of computer science. For example, physical simulations often involve objects that move continuously over time, databases host and process data that changes over time (e.g., by introduction of new information records), and connectivity in networks and distributed systems changes as links go down or come alive.

Umut's primary research focus has been self-adjusting computation, where computations respond automatically to modifications to their data. With his collaborators, he designs languages for developing self-adjusting programs, researches techniques for analyzing their complexity, and evaluates the proposed techniques by considering problem domains such as computational geometry, machine learning, and scientific computing. Umut's other interests include parallel computing, databases, and design and implementation of high-level languages.

Umut Acar received his B.S. in Computer Science from Bilkent University-Turkey in 1997, his M.A. from University of Texas at Austin in 1999, and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. Umut joins MPI-SWS from the Toyota Technological Institute of Chicago, where he was an assistant professor from 2005 to 2009.

Krishna Gummadi, Ph.D., accepts a position on the faculty of the MPI for Software Systems as an independent researcher. This position is comparable to a tenure-track Assitant Professor position at a U.S. University.

Krishna hold a B.Tech. degree from IIT Madras, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle, all in Computer Science and Engineering. Krishna has gained international recognition for his research on networked systems, as the recipient of three best paper awards at leading conferences in his area and as the main author of the most cited computer science articles in 2003 and 2004, respectively, according to citeseer. He will join the MPI for Software Systems in October 2005.

Prof. Peter Druschel, Ph.D., accepts the position of Founding Director of the MPI for Software Systems. Peter comes from Rice University in Houston, TX, where he has spent eleven years as Assistant Professor (1994-2000), Associate Professor (2000-2002) and Full Professor (2002-) of Computer Science. Peter also spent time teaching and researching at the University of Paris VI, at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and at the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. (FH) degree in Electrical Engineering from Fachhochschule Munich, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Arizona. Peter conducts research in experimental distributed systems, with a focus on self-organizing, decentralized and autonomous systems. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.

Paul Francis joins the institute's faculty as a scientific director. Paul's work over the years has focused on network routing and addressing problems, with a particular interest in large and self-configuring systems.

Paul's work has had tremendous impact on both research and industrial practice. He is best known for inventing Network Address Translation (NAT), shared multicast trees (which form the basis of PIM-SM), and the use of multiple addresses to scale routing in the face of site multihoming, which was adopted by IPv6.

Paul joins MPI-SWS from Cornell University, where he was on the faculty of the computer science department. Prior to that, Paul spent many years in industry labs such as Bellcore, NTT Research Labs in Tokyo, ACIRI in Berkeley, and at several Silicon Valley startups.

Paul Francis's arrival marks the opening of the insitute's Kaiserslautern site.

We are pleased to announce that three new faculty will join MPI-SWS.

Rodrigo Rodrigues will lead a research group on Dependable Systems. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joins us from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon.

Derek Dreyer will lead a research group on Type Systems and Functional Programming. He obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and joins us from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Andrey Rybalchenko will lead a research group on Verification Systems. He previously held a post-doctoral position with Tom Henzinger at EPFL. He is the winner of the Otto-Hahn-Medal of the Max Planck Society.