Paul Mockapetris

Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of the Domain Name System (DNS), 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. After the formal creation of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1986, DNS became one of the original Internet Standards. Paul has been associated with the IETF since its creation, chaired several 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. Paul has held leadership roles at several Silicon Valley networking startups, including @Home, Software.com (now OpenWave), Fiberlane (now Cisco), and Siara (now Ericcson). 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.