Engineering DPhil student becomes first Oxford recipient of Brendan Murphy Award

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 is 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.

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.

Sawsan's research introduces the first practical method that enables the carbon footprint of Internet traffic to be estimated using information already collected by existing network equipment. By combining real-world network measurements with models that translate network activity into energy use and carbon emissions, the approach makes it possible to quantify emissions without requiring changes to today's Internet infrastructure.

The work lays the foundations for carbon-aware networking, helping network operators, researchers and policymakers better understand and reduce the environmental impact of digital infrastructure while supporting future standards for consistent carbon accounting.

Sawsan said: ’‘I'm honoured that this work has been recognised by the research community. To me, these awards are not only a celebration of the research itself, but also a sign that sustainability is becoming an important challenge in computer systems and networking. I hope this recognition helps bring more attention to building greener digital infrastructure.'’

Winning the conference's Best Poster Award further demonstrates the work's impact, recognising not only the research itself but also its ability to communicate important ideas to a broad audience. Looking ahead, Sawsan plans to build on the research by developing an Internet standard draft that will help translate the findings into practical standards and guidance for measuring and reporting network emissions.

Her supervisor, Professor Noa Zilberman, said: ''Sawsan's research addresses one of the Internet's hidden environmental challenges: understanding and measuring its carbon footprint. By making these emissions visible for the first time in a practical way, her research opens the door to more sustainable networks and better-informed decisions by both providers and users. The recognition from the research community reflects both the technical excellence of the work and its potential for real-world impact.

SIGMETRICS is one of the world's premier conferences in computer systems performance and measurement, making recognition there particularly prestigious. Being selected as a Best Paper Runner-Up places this work among the very strongest submissions to the conference, roughly the top 1% of submissions, and highlights both its technical quality and its importance to the research community.''

Professor Zilberman added that the achievement also highlights the rapid growth of networking systems research within the department. Just six years ago, there were no academics working in this field at Oxford Engineering. Today, the department is producing internationally recognised research that is helping shape the future of sustainable networking.

Read the full paper here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3744200.3744774