EDAA Dissertation Prize 2025 for Christian Menard

Dr. Christian Menard was awarded the EDAA Dissertation Prize 2025 for his dissertation entitled "Deterministic Reactive Programming for Cyber-physical Systems" during the social event at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE'25) in Lyon, France.

In his work, he deals with new ways of optimizing embedded software for embedded, cyber-physical, secure and learning systems. The dissertation makes an important contribution to this field, among other things by developing a new programming model to support reactive programming for (distributed) cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as in the field of autonomous driving, robotics and industrial automation. This programming model guarantees that a distributed program is always executed in the correct order, even if events from the environment, such as sensor values or a camera image, occur. This reduces the number of errors and increases the safety of the software used, as Christian Menard demonstrates with a practical implementation in the popular adaptive AUTOSAR framework for autonomous driving. In his work, he also developed an optimized runtime system for the efficient deterministic programming of distributed CPSs.

These contributions were instrumental in the founding of Xronos, Inc (https://www.xronos.com), a joint venture of Christian Menard and Prof. Jeronimo Castrillon with long-time UC Berkeley collaborators Dr. Marten Lohstroh and Prof. Edward A. Lee, as well as Jeff C. Jensen.

Christian Menard completed his diploma at TU Dresden in April 2016 on the topic "Mapping KPN-Based Applications to the NoC-Based Tomahawk Architectures" and his doctorate at the Chair of Compiler Construction. Supervisor Prof. Jeronimo Castrillon-Mazo is delighted that his work has been recognized: "I was very lucky to be able to supervise Christian in my group. I hold him in high esteem as a person, as a researcher and now also as an entrepreneur. With his outstanding dissertation, he is more than a worthy recipient of the EDAA Outstanding Dissertations Award. I am very happy for him and wish him all the best for his next career step!"