Sven Apel appointed as an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow

Sven Apel, professor of computer science at Saarland University, © UdS/Oliver Dietze

Sven Apel has been appointed an ACM Fellow. With this distinction, the professor of computer science is being honored for developing theories and methods that enable people to understand, construct, and optimize software systems. Sven Apel is thus one of eleven researchers at the Saarland Informatics Campus to whom this honor has been awarded. Nationwide, only 31 people in Germany currently belong to the Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

The ACM is the largest and most important international scientific professional society for computer science. For the year 2026, only 71 new ACM Fellows were selected worldwide; they will be officially honored at an award ceremony on June 13 in San Francisco. The new Fellows were nominated by their colleagues for their outstanding achievements through technical innovation and their contributions to the field. This year’s award recipients come from 14 countries and are among the more than 100,000 members of the ACM worldwide. ACM Fellows serve as ambassadors of the organization and are often asked to make their expertise available to the media, public authorities, and industry leaders.

The research focus of Sven Apel, Professor of Software Engineering at Saarland University, lies in developing methods, tools, and theories with which reliable, efficient, and maintainable software can be constructed and analyzed. For him, the human being as a software developer is at the center, and he also dedicates himself to various interdisciplinary research questions.

Short Biography

Sven Apel studied computer science for a diploma degree at the University of Magdeburg from 1996 to 2002. He completed his doctorate there from 2003 to 2007, also in computer science. His dissertation (awarded summa cum laude) received several prestigious prizes. From 2010 to 2013, he led the Emmy Noether Research Group “Secure and Efficient Software Product Lines” at the University of Passau, before being appointed professor in 2013 within the framework of the DFG Heisenberg Program. Since 2019, Sven Apel has been Professor of Computer Science with a focus on Software Engineering at Saarland University. Since 2022, he has also led the project “Brains on Code,” funded by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant). The project aims to investigate the foundations of program comprehension using neurophysiological methods. Sven Apel is the author or co-author of more than two hundred peer-reviewed publications.

This text was machine translated from the German with no human editing.