Paul Mockapetris

Paul is the inventor of the Domain Name System (DNS), and is chief scientist and chairman of the board at Nominum, Inc. Paul created DNS in the 1980s at USC’s Information Sciences Institute, where he was later the director of ISI’s High Performance Computing and Communications Division. His mission is to help guide DNS and IP addressing to the next stage. Throughout his career, Paul has contributed to the computing research community and to the evolution of the Internet, and has been associated with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) through its inception and continuing role as the focus of new applications and extensions to DNS. His earliest work at UC Irvine on distributed systems and LAN technology preceded the commercial Ethernet and Token Ring designs. After working at ISI on the design and initial implementation of the SMTP protocol for email as part of the birth of the Internet in 1983, Paul took on the challenge of designing DNS, and then operated the original “root servers” for all Internet names. He has chaired several IETF DNS and non-DNS working groups, and was Chair of the IETF from 1994 to 1996. Paul was program manager for networking at ARPA in the early 1990s, supervising efforts such as gigabit and optical networking. From 1995 on, Paul held leadership roles at several Silicon Valley networking startups, including @Home, Software.com (now OpenWave), Fiberlane (now Cisco), and Siara (now Redback Networks). Paul has dual B.S. degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine.