Professor Palsberg's main research interests are programming languages, compilers, and software engineering. He received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award in 1998. He is a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and Theory and Practice of Object Systems. He has been a member of many program committees for international conferences, including IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, and European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. His 1994 book with Michael Schwartzbach is entitled Object-oriented Type Systems.