Peter Druschel


Peter Druschel is a German computer scientist and the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken.

Education and career

Druschel studied electrical engineering, specializing in data technology, at the Munich University of Applied Sciences and completed his studies as a graduate engineer. He graduated in 1994 from the University of Arizona under Larry L. Peterson. In the same year, he became assistant professor of computer science at Rice University. In 2000, he became an associate professor, followed by a full professorship in 2002.
In August 2005, he started his work at the Saarbrücken Max Planck Institute for Software Systems as the founding director. Druschel specializes in distributed systems such as peer-to-peer networks, security, and operating systems. Along with Ant Rowstron, Druschel developed the Pastry distributed hash table technique at Microsoft. In 2008, Druschel was elected a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In the same year, he was accepted as a full member of the Academia Europaea. He is also a recipient of the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.