Paul Mockapetris Chairman and Chief Scientist

Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of the Domain Name System (DNS), is Chief Scientist and Chairman of the Board at Nominum, Inc. His mission is to help guide DNS and IP addressing to the next stage. Paul created DNS in the 1980s at USC’s Information Sciences Institute where he was later the Director of ISI’s High Performance Computing and Communications Division. Throughout his career, Paul has contributed to the computing research community and to the evolution of the Internet. His earliest work at UC Irvine on distributed systems and LAN technology preceded the commercial Ethernet and Token Ring designs. At ISI, after working on the design of the SMTP protocol for email and its first implementation as part of the birth of the Internet in 1983, Paul took on the challenge of designing DNS, and then operated the original “root servers” for all Internet names. After the formal creation of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1986, DNS became one of the original Internet Standards; the IETF continues to be the focus of new applications and extensions to DNS. Paul has been associated with the IETF since its creation, chaired several DNS and non-DNS working groups, and was Chair of the IETF from 1994 to 1996. Paul was program manager for networking at ARPA in the early 1990s, supervising efforts such as gigabit and optical networking. From 1995 on, Paul held leadership roles at several Silicon Valley networking startups, including @Home, Software.com (now OpenWave), Fiberlane (now Cisco), and Siara (now Redback Networks). Paul’s mission at Nominum is to help guide DNS and IP addressing to the next stage. Paul has dual BS degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a PhD in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. Paul continues to believe that the future of the Internet is ahead of it.