Dr. Howard Frank

Having earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, upon his graduation in 1965, he joined the University of California at Berkeley, first as a teaching assistant then as an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, where his specialty was Network Analysis. In 1968 he received a call one day from the White House Executive Office of the President of the United States, asking him to be a consultant. He took a one-year on leave of absence from Berkeley and went to work in the Office of Emergency Preparedness, running their Network Analysis group until mid-1969. During this time he worked on two different classes of problems ? one being network vulnerability and survivability of the country's assets in the event of a war; and two, economic analysis. He and his team developed a technology to design offshore natural gas pipeline systems. The resulting technology saved $100 million in 1969. He also co-wrote a proposal that won the 1969 contract to design the network structure for the ARPAnet. He conducted the original topological analysis for the ARPAnet, evaluating the network?s performance and reliability, and studied how the technology could be applied to the larger world. That same year, he founded Network Analysis Corp. (NAC), which analyzed and designed commercial and government networks. In 1973, he and NAC worked with the Defense Communications Agency (now the Defense Information Systems Agency), to make its systems more cost-efficient. His activities have resulted in successful commercial networks for NASDAQ and other private companies, as well.