Larry Peterson is the Chief Scientist at ONF. He came to ONF from Princeton, where he was the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Princeton-hosted PlanetLab Consortium. He served as chair of the CS Department from 2003-2009. In 2007, Peterson co-founded CoBlitz LLC to commercialize CDN technology developed on PlanetLab. CoBlitz was acquired by Verivue Inc. in 2010, and subsequently by Akamai in 2012. Peterson is co-author of the best-selling networking textbook Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (6E), which is now open sourced. His research focuses on the design and implementation of networked systems.

Peterson is a former Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, was on the Editorial Board for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and the IEEE Journal on Select Areas in Communication, and served as program chair for SOSP, NSDI, and HotNets. Peterson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, the 2010 recipient of the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communication Award and the 2013 recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Award. He received his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University.