David Nagel

David Nagel is a General Partner of Forte Ventures in Atlanta, Georgia. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees and Executive Committee of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at University of California, Berkeley.

Before his current positions, Nagel was president and chief executive officer of PalmSource, Inc., a leading provider of operating system software platforms for smart mobile devices. Prior to joining PalmSource in 2001, Nagel was President of AT&T Labs from 1996 to 2001 and also served as the Chief Technology Officer of AT&T. Nagel also was the Chief Technology Officer of Concert, Inc., a joint venture of AT&T and British Telecom (BT).

Before joining AT&T, Nagel worked at Apple Computer from 1988 to 1996, where he was senior vice president responsible for the Advanced Technology Group (the Apple “Labs” of the era) and then the worldwide research and development group, responsible for all Macintosh hardware and software products. Under Nagel's direction at Apple a number of industry leading software and hardware technologies were developed that still support Apple's innovative products (QuickTime, Firewire, and Speech recognition to list but three). While at Apple, Nagel also was responsible for heading up an important industry effort at the FCC to ensure that significant unlicensed RF spectrum would be set aside to support emerging wireless packet data systems. This pioneering work termed Data PCS led eventually to the designation of spectrum that today supports WiFi wireless networks and systems.

Prior to Apple, Nagel had a long career at NASA's Ames Research Center where he was head of human factors research as Chief of the Aerospace Human Factors Research Division. Nagel worked at NASA from 1973 to 1988 following a two-year postdoctoral fellowship stint at the NASA Ames Research Center.

He is the Co-Author and Editor (with the late Earl Wiener) of Human Factors in Aviation, published by Academic Press, 1988. This book was in print for more than 25 years and was a standard monograph in a number of formal academic programs in aviation. Nagel has served on a number of national and international advisory committees, among them NATO's Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development and the first President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), on which he served five years for President William Clinton. He also served for a number of years on the UCLA Board of Visitors in the Sciences.

For the past 20 years, Nagel has served on the boards of directors of a number of private and publically traded companies. He most recently was a member of the board of directors of Align Technologies and Vonage Holdings, Inc. from which he is now retired.

Nagel and his wife also own a commercial vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains (Ascona Vineyards) that provides estate quality fruit to wineries in the SCM AVA and as far away as the Napa Valley.

In addition to serving on the ICSI board, He also served for a number of years on the boards of trustees of the SETI Institute and the Tech Museum in San Jose, California, and is an emeritus member of both boards. He holds a B.S. (1966 – Cum Laude) and M.S. degrees (1968) in engineering and a Ph.D. in perception and mathematical psychology (1972), all from UCLA.