Our people

Faculty leadership

Professor Willy Zwaenepoel, an established global leader in experimental computer science research, joined the Faculty of Engineering in July 2018.

Professor Zwaenepoel previously held the position of Head of School at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) for nine years. Before this he spent almost two decades on the faculty at Rice University, USA. Professor Zwaenepoel has been elected as a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Professor Zwaenepoel has worked in a variety of aspects of operating and distributed systems and he is best known for his work on the TreadMarks distributed shared memory system, which was licensed to Intel and became the basis for Intel’s OpenMP cluster product. He was a key advisor to Nutanix from 2010 (currently valued at US$5.5 billion) and his research has led to two startups, iMimic and BugBuster, being acquired by Cisco. He continues to advise several start-ups and is as a member of the board of ICTSwitzerland.

Professor Zwaenepoel completed his undergrad studies at Ghent University, Belgium in 1979 and obtained his master’s and doctorate degrees from Stanford University, USA in 1980 and 1984 respectively.