Distinguished Engineer/Director
Microsoft Research Silicon Valley
Microsoft Corp.

Roy Levin is a distinguished engineer and managing director of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, which he co-founded in August 2001. The lab presently numbers approximately 50 researchers working in the area of distributed computing and operates in a highly collaborative style that embraces the technical spectrum from theory to practice.

From 1996 until he joined Microsoft, Levin was director of the Digital/Compaq Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif. Previously, he was a senior researcher at the center since its founding in 1984. During those years, he was a primary contributor and project leader for the Vesta software configuration management system and for the Topaz multiprocessor programming environment and its micro-kernel operating system. Before joining Digital, Levin was a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where he was a principal developer and project co-leader of Cedar, an experimental programming environment for high-performance workstations. He was also a developer of Grapevine, a landmark electronic mail system.

Levin received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1977 and his bachelor of science in mathematics from Yale University. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a former chair of its Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS). He is author or co-author of approximately 25 technical papers, books and patents.