Robert Elliott Kahn

Co-inventor of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), Kahn is sometimes called one of the fathers of the Internet.

Kahn was born on December 23, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960 and then went on to Princeton University, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1962 and 1964, respectively. After completing his doctorate, he served as a member of the technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories before joining the faculty at MIT as an assistant professor.

In 1966, Kahn left academia and joined Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he worked on the design and implementation of the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet. His contributions to the ARPANET project proved foundational, and in 1972 he moved to the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he managed a number of significant research programs. It was during this period that he collaborated with Vinton Cerf to develop TCP/IP, the suite of protocols that became the technical backbone of the Internet. The two researchers published their landmark paper, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication," in 1974.

Kahn founded the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in 1986 and has served as its president and chief executive officer. At CNRI, he led efforts to advance the development of a National Information Infrastructure and worked on the concept of digital objects and the Handle System, a general-purpose global name service. He also played a central role in developing the concept of the National Digital Library.

Among the many honors Kahn has received are the ACM Turing Award, which he shared with Vinton Cerf in 2004, the National Medal of Technology in 1997, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. He has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and is sometimes called one of the fathers of the Internet.