Roy Levin
Distinguished Engineer/Director
Microsoft Research Silicon Valley
Microsoft Corp.

Roy Levin joined Microsoft Corp. in August 2001 to found the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab.

From 1996 until he joined Microsoft, Levin was director of Compaq’s Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif. Previously, he was a senior researcher at the center from its founding in 1984, by Digital Equipment Corp. During those years, he was a primary contributor and project leader for the Topaz programming environment and its microkernel operating system, the first to provide high-performance, lightweight process scheduling and interprocess communication on a multiprocessor workstation. He also was project leader and a primary contributor to Vesta, a software configuration management system embodying novel technology and tools for source control, version management and building of large software systems.

Before joining Digital, Levin was a principal scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. He was project co-leader and a principal developer of Cedar, an experimental programming environment for high-performance workstations. Cedar set the standard (c. 1982) for integrated programming environments for algol-tradition languages, incorporating significant advances in language technology, file systems, network communication (RPC) and user interfaces. Levin also was a co-developer of Grapevine, a landmark electronic mail system.

Levin received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and his bachelor of science in mathematics from Yale University. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a former chair of ACM SIGOPS. He is author or co-author of approximately 20 technical papers, books and patents.