Benny Åkesson was born in Landskrona, Sweden in 1977. He earned a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden in 2005. In 2010, Dr. Åkesson received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, on the topic of real-time memory controllers. This research was conducted in collaboration with NXP Semiconductors. During the following five years, Dr. Åkesson extended this work as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology, and Czech Technical University in Prague. He was also a Visiting Researcher at Airbus Group Innovations in Ottobrunn, Germany, during two months in 2014.

He is currently employed as a Research Associate at the CISTER/INESC TEC Research Unit at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, where he is supervising and conducting research on real-time systems. His research interests include memory controller architectures, real-time resource scheduling, performance modeling, and performance virtualization. He is the author of more than 50 peer-reviewed international publications and a book about memory controllers for real-time embedded systems..

Benny was in CISTER from August 2012 - January 2013 and returned to the unit in July 2015.