Biographical Information

Stephen Wolff

Stephen Wolff started his technology career with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1961 and subsequent post-doctoral work at Imperial College in 1962. For 10 years after that he taught electrical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University, specializing in statistical communication theory. Wolff spent 14 years as a communications and technology researcher for the United States Army. He is credited with introducing UNIX and leading the minicomputer "revolt" within the Army's research labs during the early 1980s. He also supervised development of technology for ARPANET, the first operational packet-switched network and precursor to the Internet. At the National Science Foundation he directed NSF's Gigabit Testbed project, the first feasibility study of IP networking at gigabit speeds that was jointly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He left the NSF and joined Cisco Systems in 1994 and directed Cisco's involvement with the Internet2 and Abilene projects, both efforts driven by the higher education community to create a next generation super high-bandwidth Internet backbone network. He now serves officially as a business development manager for the Academic Research and Technology Initiative (ARTI) program.