Assistant Director
Microsoft Research Silicon Valley
Microsoft Corp.

Michael D. Schroeder joined Microsoft Research in August 2001 as assistant director of the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab. His current technical focus is on distributed storage systems.

Schroeder has been a faculty member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a researcher at the Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and at the Compaq Systems Research Center, where he was also associate director.

He has worked on time-sharing, computer security, distributed e-mail systems, remote procedure call, switch-based local area networks, large-scale naming systems, global cluster file systems, and Web-based access to personal information. He was co-inventor of the Needham-Schroeder authentication protocol, and a designer and builder of the Multics time-sharing system, the Grapevine distributed e-mail system, the Cedar distributed file system, the Topaz distributed operating system, the Autonet and AN2 switch-based LANs, and the Pachyderm Web-based e-mail system.

He received his bachelor of science degree from Washington State University, and a master of science degree and a doctorate in computer science from MIT. He holds a number of patents on switch-based LANs and Web-based e-mail systems. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and has been general chairman and program committee member for various SIGOPS Symposia on Operating Systems Principles.

In 2006 he received the Outstanding Innovations Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) for technical contributions to the field of computer and communication security that have had a lasting impact in furthering or understanding the theory and/or development of commercial systems. In 2007 he received the National Computer Systems Security Award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Security Agency (NIST/NSA), presented for significant long-term contributions in the computer security field. In 2008 he received the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award that recognizes the most influential operating systems papers in the peer-reviewed literature at least 10 years old. Since the mid-1990s he has been involved in technical outreach activities exploring the impact of the Web on the methodology of cultural history. He is the world’s leading authority on the 19th-century American landscape artist Gilbert Munger and authors the online catalog raisonné (http://gilbertmunger.org).