Dawson Engler is easily one of the more important people in software systems research today, and he's risen to the top with interesting work and papers in a short time. I was engaged in some serious study of his exokernel and dynamic compilation work as a side hobby when I was working for Viasec in Ireland. Since moving back to the States, all those papers and notes were filed away and boxed up and have been out of my reach until recently. In going over everything again, I get psyched about the exokernel idea. I can't wait until I can put together a prototype exokernel box. Engler's newest work is in metacompilation, where for one example, he modifies a compiler and uses the extensions to find lots (couple thousand) of flaws in various systems in Linux, OpenBSD, and Xok (an exokernel operating system). Ubernifty.

Some links:

Dawson Engler: http//www.stanford.edu/~engler/
Dawson Engler (old site): http//www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/~engler/

And, as always, check ResearchIndex/CiteSeer.