Dr. Guru Parulkar joined Stanford University in August 2007 and served as the Executive Director of its Clean Slate Internet Design Program. He has been in the field of networking for over 25 years and cherishes the opportunities he has had to work with great people. He has worked in academia (Washington University in St. Louis and now Stanford), startups (Growth Networks and others), a large company (Cisco), a top-tier venture capital firm (NEA), and a federal funding agency (NSF).
At Stanford, Guru helped create three large projects with Nick McKeown, Monica Lam, Balaji Prabhakar, and others: OpenFlow/Software-Defined Networking, Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020 (POMI 2020), and Stanford Experimental Data Center Laboratory (SEDL).
Before joining Stanford, Guru spent four years at National Science Foundation (NSF) and worked with the broader research community and NSF CISE team to champion and create programs such as GENI, Future Internet Design, and the Network of Sensor Systems. Guru received the NSF Director’s award for Program Management excellence.
Before NSF, Guru spent four years in Silicon Valley. There, he founded successful and not-so-successful startups such as Growth Networks, Tenaya Networks, Sceos (Ruckus Wireless), and Nevis Networks, and worked with accomplished entrepreneurs, engineers, and business leaders. Guru also served as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at NEA during 2001. He received NEA’s Entrepreneurship Award in 2001 for Growth Networks. He was a nominated TiE Washington D.C. Charter Member and is now a TiE Silicon Valley Charter Member. He continues to serve as a technical advisor to several startups.
Before the startups, Guru spent over 12 years at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Applied Research Laboratory. There, he worked with Jon Turner, Jerry Cox, George Varghese, and a group of very talented and creative graduate students to lead research and prototyping of high-performance networking and multimedia systems such as the virtual memory system of NetBSD and FreeBSD Unix (Chuck Cranor), APIC gigabit network interface (Zubin Dittia and others), router plug-in software (Dan Decasper and Zubin Dittia), packet striping algorithms (Hari Adiseshu), multimedia on demand server and service (Milind Buddhikot), and Real Time Upcall system for QoS for NetBSD (R. Gopal), Congram-oriented Internetworking to get QoS and performance (Tony Mazaani and Sanjay Kapoor), IP and ATM integration, and others.
Guru received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Delaware in 1987 (advisor: Dave Farber) at a time when UDEL was at the center of exciting developments in networking including CSNET, NSFNET, Memnet, gigabit testbeds, and others. Guru is a recipient of the Alumni Outstanding Achievement and Frank A. Pehrson Graduate Student Achievement awards from the University of Delaware.
Highlights of Guru’s professional services include ACM SIGCOMM’99 PC Co-Chair, NOSSDAV’97 PC Chair, ACM/IEEE Transaction on Networking Technical and Publications Editor, IEEE Network Editor, and Co-Editor of the IEEE JSAC special issue on Gigabit Networking.
