Van Wijngaarden Award for Marta Kwiatkowska

Trinity Professorial Fellow Marta Kwiatkowska is a recipient of this year’s Van Wijngaarden Awards. Along with mathematician Susan A. Murphy, Professor Kwiatkowska is being recognised for her significant contribution to research in identifying software faults. 

The five-yearly award is established by CWI, the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, and is named after former CWI director Aad van Wijngaarden. The prize will be awarded on 18 November.

Professor Kwiatkowska has pioneered research on modelling, verification, and synthesis of probabilistic systems. She led the development of the highly influential PRISM probabilistic model checker, which is widely used for research and teaching and which has been downloaded over 80,000 times. She has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and is a recipient of the Milner Award and British Computer Society Lovelace Medal. In 2019 she became Fellow of the Royal Society.

The five-yearly Van Wijngaarden Award is named after Adriaan van Wijngaarden (1916–1987). Van Wijngaarden was directly involved in the introduction of the computer in the Netherlands and has been of invaluable importance for CWI and the evolution of the computer in our country. He is also one of the founders of computer science in the Netherlands and laid the foundation for several mainstream computer languages.