News

European PhD Award is awarded again to VU Alumni

The EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award has been awarded to Jorrit Herder. This is the second year in a row that this prestigious award has been awarded to a VU Alumni. This award distinguishes the best PhD thesis of the year in the area of computer systems in Europe.

This annual prize awards €2000 to a PhD student from a European University whose thesis is regarded to be an exceptional, innovative contribution to knowledge in the Computer Systems area. Competition is very high to receive this award. Last year the award went to Willem de Bruijn, which means that the computer science department received the award twice in a row! This has never happened in the (short) history of the Roger Needham award. The award is presented at the yearly Eurosys conference.

Jorrit's thesis, Building a Dependable Operating System - Fault tolerance in MINIX, was supervised by Professor Andrew Tanenbaum and Herbert Bos. His thesis focuses on how operating systems can be made more reliable and secure by using microkernels. Jorrit is currently working in Australia as a software engineer for Google.

Jorrit`s thesis : http://dare.ubvu.vu.nl/handle/1871/16055
Eurosys conference site - http://eurosys2011.cs.uni-salzburg.at