Stanford University Campus

Nick McKeown

Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Stanford University

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Nick McKeown

Short Biography

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 currently living in the UK where he is a Visiting Professor of Engineering at Oxford University, a member of the UK PM’s Council on Science and Technology (CST), and a non-executive Board member at ARIA, a new UK funding agency modeled on ARPA.

Nick is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), the IEEE and the ACM. He received the Marconi Prize (2025), the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal (2021), the IET Mountbatten Medal (2021), the NEC Computer and Communications Prize (2015), the British Computer Society Lovelace Medal (2005), the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award (2009), the ACM Sigcomm Lifetime Achievement Award (2012), and 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, AI fabrics, low-cost AUVs for oceanographic research and video streaming.

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Public Domain Statement

I place all of my research work in the public domain. I believe university research should serve society at large, and should be freely available for anyone to use and learn from.

I have nothing against patents in principle: Industry invests huge amounts of time and money in R&D and needs to protect new ideas to give them the confidence to continue to invest. As academic researchers, I favor staying ahead by running faster, rather than protecting our backs. It keeps us on our toes and makes us more innovative. And it makes it much easier to work with our colleagues in industry.

I am very lucky that Stanford allowed me — as a Principal Investigator — to decide whether to place ideas in the public domain. Since 1999, I have placed all my university research in the public domain.

About

I joined Stanford in 1995 just as the Internet was exploding in growth. My research group “The McKeown Group” has worked on lots of fun projects. From 1995-2005 we focussed on making the Internet faster - Internet router designs, crossbar scheduling algorithms for switched backplanes, lookup algorithms and novel memories. From 2005, we focussed on enabling the internet to evolve, which led to Software Defined Networking (SDN), Programmable Forwarding (P4 and Tofino), Mininet, NetFPGA and VNS. Along the way we worked on video streaming algorithms now used by Netflix; the size of a router buffer; and congestion control algorithms. As of 2026, we are working on AI fabrics and low-cost underwater vehicles for oceanographic research.

New students: I am not currently taking new PhD students. But if you are Stanford student with a passion for video streaming or AUVs, let's talk.

Teaching

Contact

Office
Gates 443, Stanford University
Email
nickm at stanford dot edu
Admin
Beverly Davis (beverlyd at stanford dot edu)