Nick McKeown (PhD/MS UC Berkeley ’95/’92; B.E Univ. of Leeds, ’86) is the Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield and Sequoia Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University, Visiting Professor of Engineering at Oxford University, Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford and Senior Fellow at Intel. From 1986-1989 he worked for Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bristol, England. In 1995, he helped architect Cisco’s GSR 12000 router. Nick was co-founder and CTO at Abrizio (acquired by PMC-Sierra, 1998), co-founder and CEO of Nemo (“Network Memory”),acquired by Cisco, 2005. In 2007 he co-founded Nicira (acquired by VMware) with Martin Casado and Scott Shenker. Nick was chairman of Barefoot Networks which he co-founded with Pat Bosshart and Martin Izzard in 2013 (acquired by Intel, 2019). In 2011, he co-founded the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) with Scott Shenker; the Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) with Guru Parulkar and Scott Shenker; and P4.org with Jen Rexford and Amin Vahdat.

From 2021 to 2023 he was SVP of the Network and Edge Computing Group (NEX) and Senior Fellow at Intel.

Nick is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Natioanl Academy of Inventors, and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), the IEEE and the ACM. He received the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal (2021), the IET Mountbatten Medal (2021), the NEC Computer and Commmunications Prize (2015), the British Computer Society Lovelace Medal (2005), the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award (2009), the ACM Sigcomm Lifetime Achievement Award (2012), the IEEE Rice communications theory award (1999). Nick has an Honorary Doctorate from ETH (Zurich, 2014). Nick’s current research interests include making networks more programmable, from the control and management down to how packets are processed on the wire, and tools and platforms for networking teachers and researchers.