Thomas Doeppner is interested in operating systems and everything related to them. He wrote one of the first threads packages for Unix and has dabbled in threads and concurrency ever since. With the help of a number of top undergraduate students, he worked on tools for measuring and analyzing performance of concurrent programs, particularly on shared-memory multiprocessors. He also designed and implemented an object-oriented threads package for C++, using ideas borrowed from Sun's Spring operating system.

More recently, he worked with wireless devices and mobile computers, building an infrastructure for sharing information in settings such as lectures, seminars, and face-to-face meetings. He is currently interested in the area of operating system support for security. He is investigating means for running arbitrary programs without fear of the consequences. In the distant past he did work in proving the correct of parallel programs and published papers in STOC, POPL, and PODC.