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About me

Portrait photo of Stephan Druskat.

I am a computer science researcher in software engineering, and a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI).

In my research, I focus on the quality and sustainability of research software with an emphasis on software supply chains and ecosystems, software metadata, research software engineering methods and - increasingly - software security. I am interested in understanding and improving how people, practices, policies and infrastructure shape how software is developed, maintained, published, cited and reused in academic contexts and across disciplines. For my PhD, I'm developing a way to measure the impact of dependencies on research software, to enable transitive credit, and to make hidden but important research dependencies more visible.

Figure 2 from my paper https://doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2019.2952840, showing a citation graph that includes software versions as citable entities.

Until early 2026, I was part of the Sustainable Software Engineering Group at the German Aerospace Center's Institute of Software Technology.

Before this I have worked as a Research Software Engineer in linguistics and digital humanities projects, and as Managing Editor at Wiley-Blackwell.

Education

I received my Magister Artium (MA) in English Philology (major), Modern German Literature, and General and German Linguistics (minor) from the Free University Berlin in 2010.

Personal

I live in Berlin, Germany, with my partner and our three kids.