Honors & Awards

The CompSys section has exceptionally strong staff members, who have won prestigious personal grants. The full professors have won top-ranked grants from the science foundation (NWO PIONIER, VICI, Gravitation, Growth Fund) and EU (ERC) and serve on the highest advisory bodies of the government, such as the Dutch Cyber Security Council and the Electoral Council). Younger faculty members have won a number of NWO VENI grants.

The staff has won numerous international research awards, including lifetime achievement awards from EuroSys (Tanenbaum), USENIX (Tanenbaum), and Euro-Par (Bal), several SPECtacular Awards (Iosup), VMware Early Career Faculty Award (Giuffrida), EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award (Giuffrida), two Dutch ICT Researcher of the Year Award (Iosup, Giuffrida), next to many Pwnie Awards (Bos, Giuffrida). Marten van Dijk won the 2023 SIGSAC CCS Test of Time Award as well as the 2025 HPCA Test of Time Award.

The staff has also won major educational awards. Specifically, Tanenbaum has won the IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal and the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator award. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE as well as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His educational books are used by over a million students worldwide. Bal is a Member of the Academia Europeana. Iosup has won the Dutch teacher of the year award (across all academic education).

Finally, our section has produced a number of award-winning PhDs. Since 2010 alone, seven PhD theses have won the Roger Needham PhD Award  for best systems PhD thesis in Europe, outperforming any other systems group. Moreover, two such theses have also won the ACM SIGSAC Dissertation Award, while another one also won the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award. Moreover, three theses have won the William C. Carter PhD Dissertation Award. Some of our PhD students have also won industry-sponsored fellowships such as the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship.