Zwanepoel has made fundamental, high-impact, lasting contributions to the theory and practice of distributed computing systems, through his work on distributed shared memory, lazy release consistency, and resource management in compute clusters. His work underpins much of present cloud computing and data centres powering large-scale deep learning. He has also created high impact through is leadership as Dean at EPFL, turning is ICT faculty from second-tier into a world leader. He is now in the process of repeating this at Sydney University.