Paul V. Mockapetris

Twenty years ago, Paul Mockapetris designed the Domain Name System (DNS), which allows users to enter names (such as www.ieee.org) instead of numeric network addresses to locate people and resources on the Internet. Today, the DNS is the Internet's database of Web and email addresses and is being embedded into new applications, such as ENUM for IP telephony.  Dr. Mockapetris defined the DNS protocol and created its initial implementation. With Dr. Jon Postel and others at University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and SRI, he deployed the initial root server system and coordinated with other researchers the implementation of DNS on all Internet operating systems. At ISI, he also implemented the first SMTP email server.

A member of the IEEE, Dr. Mockapetris has chaired the Internet Engineering Task Force and has received the University of California at Irvine's distinguished alumnus award. He is chief scientist and chairman at Nominum in Redwood City, Calif.