Associate Professor
Umeå University
Paul Townend (https://www.umu.se/en/staff/paul-townend/) is an Associate Professor at Umeå University (UmU) since 2020. He is a Research Leader within the Umeå Autonomous Distributed Systems Lab and has led/co-led over 50M SEK in successfully completed research projects. Paul is currently Scientific Coordinator of the SovereignEdge project (Horizon Europe, 2023-2025) that seeks to create a European Reference Architecture for task placement in serverless systems, Scientific Coordinator of the WASP WARA-Ops research arena (WASP, 2023-2025), and Co-I of the “Etablering av ett de facto Excellenscenter inom Autonoma Distribuerade System” project (Kempe Foundation, 2022-2026).
Paul is the Leader of the WASP Autonomous Clouds and Networks area cluster, coordinator and examiner of the WASP Cloud Computing and Software Engineering foundational course, and member of the WASP Graduate School Management (GSM) group.
Previously, Paul was CTO (2017-2020) of Edgetic Ltd – a UK university start-up company focussing on developing modelling and scheduling software for improving energy-efficiency in Cloud-Edge systems. Prior to this, he was Research Fellow and University Academic Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK (2004-2017) where he was Team Leader of the Distributed Systems and Service (DSS) group. He has served as General Chair for 14 IEEE international conferences.