Scott Shenker

Scott Shenker is one of the true visionaries in the world of networking technology. A pioneer in the field of software-defined networking (SDN), Scott co-founded and served as initial CEO of Nicira, an early SDN company, which was sold to VMware for $1.26B in 2012. Scott is also co-founder of the Open Networking Foundation, a leading body in furthering open standards and open source in networking. Scott has also conducted extensive research in analytics and in 2013, he co-founded Databricks, which provides a commercial implementation of Apache Spark, and currently serves on the company’s board of directors. In 2017, Scott co-founded Nefeli Networks to provide innovation in the network function virtualization (NFV) space, and is the current chairman of the board.

Scott is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2016 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Scott is currently a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at UC Berkeley. He is also the chief scientist and the leader of the New Initiatives Group at the International Computer Science Institute, where he was a founding member of the ICSI Center for Internet Research. He continues to research and publish, with his work among the most cited across all of computer science.

Scott received his Sc.B. in physics from Brown University and his PhD in physics from the University of Chicago. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago.