For her award-winning doctoral thesis Flexible Hardware-based Security-aware Mechanisms and Architectures, Dessouky investigated the prospects and implications at the intersection of hardware and security that emerge across the full stack of computing platforms, with a closer focus on leveraging hardware for securing software better and designing more secure processor microarchitecture. The thesis was supervised by CROSSING-PI Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (TU Darmstadt) and her second co-advisor was Professor Farinaz Koushanfar from the University of California, San Diego, USA.

Within CROSSING, Dr.-Ing. Dessouky was involved in project P3 on Hardware-Entangled Cryptography. After finishing her doctoral thesis at TU Darmstadt, she joined Goolge as a hardware security researcher.

The EuroSys Roger Needham PhD award is an annual prize awarded to a PhD student from a European University whose thesis is regarded to be an exceptional, innovative contribution to knowledge in the systems area. The winner will receive 2000 EUR, which will be awarded at the EuroSys conference. The prize is donated by Microsoft Research Cambridge. Criteria for selection are the overall contribution to systems research in terms of scientific originality, scientific significance, scientific rigor, quality of the presentation, and potential for practical application.