Professor Peter Sewell FRS

Peter Sewell is a computer scientist, interested especially in how one can develop and use mathematical models for mainstream computer-systems abstractions, to make the systems that we all depend on better understood, more robust, and more secure.


He and his group are best known for their work on the subtle relaxed-memory concurrency behaviour and detailed sequential semantics of processors and programming languages. They have brought these into the mathematical domain, creating experimentally grounded models that de-mystify them for practitioners and theoreticians, to enable more rigorous engineering and more realistic theory.  They have done the same at design time for new capability-enabled processor architectures, that build in better security protection, with machine-checked proof that full-scale architecture specifications have their intended security properties.


He is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge.

Professional position

  • Professor of Computer Sciences, University of Cambridge, University of Cambridge

Subject groups

  • Computer Sciences

    Systems, including networking, Programming languages and verification, Security and privacy

  • Engineering and Materials Science

    Computer engineering (including software)

Professor Peter Sewell FRS
Elected 2023
Committees Participated Role
Research Appointment Panel A(iii) January 2025 - December 2027 Member
Rosalind Franklin Award Committee January 2003 - December 2006 Member