Sawsan El-Zahr has become the first student from the University of Oxford to receive the prestigious Brendan Murphy Award, recognising outstanding research in computer systems and networking.
Sawsan, a final-year DPhil student in the Department's Computing Infrastructure Networks Group, received the award for her research, From Measurement to Emissions: Assessing the Carbon Footprint of Traffic Flows. Presented by the UK academic systems and networking community, the Brendan Murphy Award has recognised exceptional early-career researchers since 2003, making Sawsan the first Oxford student to receive the honour.
The research has also gained international recognition, receiving the Best Poster Award at the ACM/IEEE N2Women Workshop and being named Best Paper Runner-Up at ACM SIGMETRICS 2026, the world's leading conference in computer systems performance evaluation and measurement.
Saswan presenting her research work
Although the Internet powers almost every aspect of modern life, measuring the carbon emissions generated by moving data across global networks has remained a significant challenge. Every time people stream a film, make a video call or use cloud-based services, their data travels through networks operated by multiple providers, making it difficult to understand the environmental impact of that activity.
