Professor Gernot Heiser receives the 2025 IEEE TCRTS

UNSW Sydney Professor Gernot Heiser from the School of Computer Science and Engineering has been selected as the recipient of a distinguished award in the field of real-time systems. The Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award is an annual award given by the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems (TCRTS) to recognise individuals for their technical achievements and leadership in Real-Time Computing. Nominees for this award should have a clear record of impact within the real-time systems community.

Professor Heiser holds the position of Scientia Professor and John Lions Chair of Operating Systems at UNSW Sydney. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, and the Royal Society of NSW, and a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, a reflection of a career defined by both technical excellence and broad influence across the global research community.

His work spans operating systems, hypervisors, and real-time computing, and has shaped how engineers and researchers think about the execution time of programs in safety-critical environments. Over the decades, he has built and led research groups that brought together collaborators from more than twenty countries, making international collaboration a defining feature of his work.

Among his most significant contributions is the creation and world-first formal verification of the seL4 microkernel, a key achievement in computer science that demonstrated that a general-purpose operating system kernel could be mathematically proven correct. While he continues to work on extending verification to complete operating systems, the seL4 Foundation supports the microkernel’s ongoing development and real-world deployment.

His work on L4 microkernels prior to seL4 led to the startup Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), which took this technology to market, putting it into billions of mobile devices around the world, before General Dynamics acquired the company in 2012. Earlier in his career, Heiser pioneered the use of multi-dimensional device simulation for the optimisation of silicon solar cells.

The award highlights both Professor Heiser’s technical achievements and his leadership in shaping a research community focused on building trustworthy systems for the real world.

His contributions continue to influence how researchers and engineers think about the future of secure, high-assurance computing.

The award was presented by the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems and was announced at the Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS) 2026.