Two International Honors for Saarbrücken Max Planck Director

Professor Derek Dreyer, scientific director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Photo: Oliver Dietze

Professor Derek Dreyer, Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), has recently received two prestigious international awards recognizing his research. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest scientific society in computer science, has named him an ACM Fellow. Additionally, at the 2025 edition of the “Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages” (POPL), he together with colleagues was awarded the “Most Influential Paper Award” for a landmark paper published in 2015.

With the Fellow status, the Association for Computing Machinery recognizes the top one percent of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. According to the organisation, the ACM now has more than 100,000 members worldwide. In 2024, 55 scientists from around the world were elevated to the rank of ACM Fellows, of these 13 from Europe. Derek Dreyer was recognized “for contributions to the logical and semantic foundations of programming languages,” as stated in ACM’s award citation.

Derek Dreyer also received the “ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential POPL Paper Award” together with several colleagues, including MPI-SWS alumni Ralf Jung, David Swasey, and Aaron Turon, for their paper “Iris: Monoids and Invariants as an Orthogonal Basis for Concurrent Reasoning.” This annual award recognizes research that has had a lasting impact on the theory and practice of programming languages. In their paper, the researchers developed “Iris,” a mathematical framework for the formal verification of concurrent programs. Iris has since become a widely used tool in program semantics and verification.

“I feel deeply honored to receive these prestigious awards,“ says Derek Dreyer.  “They are a testament to the incredibly supportive research culture at the Max Planck Society and Saarland University, as well as to the amazing work of my students and colleagues, who have made fundamental contributions to the success of Iris.”

Since 2008, Dreyer has been a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, serving as Scientific Director since 2022. He is also currently the Managing Director of the Institute, which has locations in Saarbrücken and Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Further Information
https://www.acm.org/media-center/2025/january/fellows-2024
Award-winning Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775051.2676980

Scientific Contact:
Prof. Dr. Derek Dreyer
Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
Email: dreyer@mpi-sws.org

Editor:
Philipp Zapf-Schramm
Max Planck Institute for Informatics
Tel: +49681 9325 4509
Email: pzs@mpi-inf.mpg.de