EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award

Prize donated by Microsoft Research

The EuroSys Roger Needham PhD award is an annual prize awarded to a PhD student from a European University whose thesis is regarded to be an exceptional, innovative contribution to knowledge in the systems area. “Systems” is interpreted broadly, and includes operating systems, distributed systems, real-time systems, transactional and database systems, language runtimes, embedded systems, computer networks, systems aspects of programming, systems security, etc. The winner will receive 2000 EUR, which will be awarded at the EuroSys conference.

Criteria for selection are the overall contribution to systems research in terms of scientific originality, scientific significance, scientific rigor, quality of the presentation, and potential for practical application.

EuroSys 2025 Roger Needham PhD Award Recipients

• • Hugo Lefeuvre, for his thesis: Towards Safe, Flexible, and Easy Software Compartmentalisation

Past Recipients:

• • 2024: Rishabh Iyer, for his  thesis: Latency Interfaces for Systems Code

  • 2023: Ghada Dessouky, for her thesis: Flexible Hardware-based Security-aware Mechanisms and Architectures

  • 2023: Ben Gras, for his thesis: Side Channel Security Risks in Commodity Microarchitectures

    • (Honorable Mention) Antonios Katsarakis, for his thesis: Invalidation-based Protocols for Replicated Datastores

  • 2022: Rüdiger Birkner, for his thesis Improving Network Understanding

    • (Honourable Mention) Igor Zablotchi, for his thesis Distributed Computing with Modern Shared Memory

  • 2021: Victor van der Veen, for his thesis When Memory Serves no so Well: Memory Errors 30 Years Later. 

    • (Honourable Mention) Marios Kogias, for his thesis Operating System and Network co-Design for Latency-Critical Datacenter Applications.

  • 2020: Michael Schwarz, for his thesis Software-based Side-Channel Attacks and Defenses in Restricted Environments. 

    • (Honourable Mention) Nils Asmussen, for his thesis A New System Architecture for Heterogeneous Compute Units.

  • 2019: Manolis Karpathiotakis, for his thesis Just-in-time Analytics Over Heterogeneous Data and Hardware.

    • (Honourable Mention) Zsolt Istvan, for his thesis Building Distributed Storage with Specialized Hardware.

  • 2018: Dennis Andriesse, for his thesis Analyzing and Securing Binaries Through Static Disassembly.

    • (Honourable Mention) Leonidas Kosmidis, for his thesis Enabling Caches in Probabilistic Timing Analysis.

  • 2017: Vasileios Trigonakis, for his thesis Towards Scalable Synchronization on Multi-Cores.

  • 2016: Baris Kasikici, for his thesis Techniques for Detection, Root Cause Diagnostics, and Classification of In-Production Concurrency Bugs.

  • 2015: Cristiano Giuffrida, for his thesis Safe and Automatic Live Update.

  • 2014: Torvald Riegel, for his thesis Software Transactional Memory Building Blocks.

  • 2013: Asia Slowinska, for her thesis Using Information Flow Tracking to Protect Legacy Binaries.

  • 2012: Derek Murray, for his thesis A Distributed Execution Engine Supporting Data-Dependent Control Flow.

    • (Honourable Mention) Nedeljko Vasic, for his thesis Energy-Proportional and Scalable Networks.

  • 2011: Jorrit Herder, for his thesis Building a Dependable Operating System: Fault Tolerance in MINIX 3.

  • 2010: Willem de Bruijn, for his thesis Adaptive Operating System Design for High Throughput I/O.

  • 2009: Jacob Gorm Hansen, for his thesis Virtual Machine Mobility with Self-Migration.

  • 2008: Adam Dunkels, for his thesis Programming Memory-Constrained Networked Embedded Systems.

  • 2007: Nick Cook, for his thesis Middleware Support for Non-repudiable Business-to-Business Interactions.

  • 2006: Oliver Heckmann, for his thesis, A System-oriented Approach to Efficiency and Quality of Service for Internet Service Providers.

Nominations for the 2025 award — for students who have defended their PhD thesis after September 1, 2023 are now closed. The deadline for nominations was December 1, 2024. By this date the student must have defended the dissertation that will be submitted.

Nominations can only be made by a student’s PhD supervisor. A nomination must include:

• • The title and abstract of the dissertation;

  • a copy of the dissertation itself (PDF);

  • a (1 page) recommendation letter from the submitter (PDF);

  • the name of the institution and the date of the defense;

  • a CV of the candidate with publication list.

It may optionally include a PDF file containing supporting publications (mandatory if the dissertation is not written in English)

Nominations should be mailed to needham-award@eurosys.org.

The current committee of the EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award comprises 

• Oana Balmau, McGill University

• David Bromberg, University of Rennes I

• Natacha Crooks, UC Berkeley

• Christof Fetzer, TU Dresden

• Anne-Marie Kermarrec (Chair), EPFL

• Rodrigo Rodrigues, Instituto Superior Tecnico (ULisboa)