Gernot Heiser
Chief Scientific Officer at UNSW
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGernot Heiser is a distinguished computer scientist and technology leader who has built and led world-class research groups in microkernel and formally verified operating systems for three decades. As Scientia Professor at UNSW, founding NICTA research leader, and current Chief Scientific Officer at Neutrality, he steers the transition of provably secure kernels like seL4 from academia into real-world deployments. His work underpins billions of mobile devices via L4 lineage and led the world-first formal verification of seL4, a milestone now supported by the seL4 Foundation. He combines deep systems research, startup creation (Open Kernel Labs), and industry-facing roles (HENSOLDT Cyber) to bridge rigorous formal methods with practical secure-hardware integration. A Fellow of ACM, IEEE, ATSE and the Royal Society of NSW, he uniquely pairs long-standing academic influence with entrepreneurial impact. Less obvious: his early interdisciplinary work included multidimensional device simulation for silicon solar cells, reflecting a rare blend of systems software and physical-device expertise.
9 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Physics, BSc Physics at The University of FreiburgAbitur Math-Nat, Abitur Math-Nat at Markgräfler Gymnasium MüllheimPhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at ETH ZürichMSc Physics, MSc Physics at Brock University
German, English
Github Skills (34)
verification10
proof10
docstrings10
idris10
sel410
microkernel9
documentation9
core-platform8
sml7
kernel6
operating-system6
benchmarking6
github-ci6
arm5
sat5
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
seL4/whitepaper
Jun 2020 - Jan 2025
Source for the seL4 white paper
Contributions:5 reviews, 5 PRs, 20 pushes in 4 years 7 months
white-paperwhitesel4microkernelos
seL4/website
Aug 2020 - Aug 2022
The seL4.systems website
Contributions:67 reviews, 215 commits, 148 PRs in 1 year 11 months
microkernelsel4verification
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