Robert Metcalfe

Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe recently started his second decade as professor of innovation in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Bob is founding director of UT Austin's Texas Innovation Center (TxIC). He is also professor of entrepreneurship in the McCombs School of Business and UT Austin's Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise. Bob is also principal investigator of http://TexasGEO.org, which aims to solve energy, once and for all, with geothermal startups and their partners in the oil and gas industries. GEO is funded for another year by DOE to encourage startups to advance technologies delivering cheap, safe, clean, abundant, ubiquitous, deep, baseload geothermal energy. Bob was an Internet pioneer beginning 1970 at MIT, Harvard, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), Stanford, and 3Com. He invented Ethernet at Parc on May 22, 1973 and remains a champion of Ethernet and connectivity more generally. Bob has won the Bell, Hopper, Japan C&C, Marconi, McCluskey, Shannon, and Stibitz Prizes. He’s a Life Trustee Emeritus of MIT and member of the National Academy of Engineering. Bob received the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Medal of Honor in 1996 and the National Medal of Technology in 2005, both for his leadership in the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet. Bob founded Internet startup 3Com Corporation in Silicon Valley in June 1979. He took it public 1984 and departed 1990. 3Com was acquired by HP Enterprise in 2010. During the 1990s, Bob was CEO/Publisher/Columnist at IDG/InfoWorld Magazine. His Internet column, FROM THE ETHER, was for eight years read weekly by more than a million information technologists among IDG's 90 countries.