Peter Druschel

Peter Druschel is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and leads the Distributed Systems Group. He holds adjunct professorships at Saarland University and the University of Maryland, reflecting his strong academic affiliations in computer science. He has previously served as a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University and has held visiting positions at MIT, Microsoft Research Cambridge, and LIP6.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Arizona, 1994

His research centers on building secure, compliant, and privacy-preserving distributed and mobile systems. Key interests include accountable systems, peer-to-peer networks, operating systems, and network security. He has led foundational work in systems like Pastry, Scribe, and Glacier, and currently focuses on privacy compliance in data processing through projects like Thoth and iPic. His work is supported by major grants from the ERC, Max Planck Society, DFG, BMBF, and Google.

The recent publications highlight a consistent trend in secure and privacy-aware systems, with a focus on policy enforcement, isolation mechanisms, anonymity, and mobile security. These works span top venues such as USENIX Security, OSDI, MobiSys, and SIGCOMM, reflecting sustained impact in systems and security communities.

Scientific Awards:

• NSF CAREER Award (1995)
• Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2000)
• SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award (2008)
• Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award (2016)
• EuroSys Lifetime Achievement Award (2017)

Druschel has advised numerous PhD and master’s students and postdoctoral researchers at MPI-SWS. He has co-directed major collaborative programs including the Cornell-Maryland-Max Planck Pre-doctoral School and the Maryland Max Planck Ph.D. Program. His leadership extends to professional service, having chaired SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, and EuroSys, and served on editorial boards of CACM, TOCS, and Royal Society Open Science. He is a member of Academia Europaea and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Labs and Teams:

• Distributed Systems Group, MPI-SWS
• imPACT ERC Synergy Project
• Collaborators include Bobby Bhattacharjee, Deepak Garg, Miguel Castro, Ion Stoica, and others