Stephen Wolff

Credited with turning the Internet from a government project into something of scholarly and commercial interest for the rest of the world, Wolff is sometimes called one of the many fathers of the internet. He realized before most the potential in the internet and began selling the idea that it could have a profound effect on both the commercial and academic world.

Wolff earned a BSc with Highest Honors in Electrical Engineering from Swarthmore College in 1957, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1961. In 1962 he continued his studies with subsequent post-doctoral work at Imperial College.

For fourteen years he worked as a communications and technology researcher for the United States Army. While working for the Army, Wolff introduced the UNIX operating system to Army labs, which led to the minicomputer "revolt" within the labs in the early 1980s. He also managed a research group that participated in the development of ARPANET, a major technology precursor to the internet.

In 1986 he became Division Director for Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation. In this position Wolff managed the development of a backbone network called NSFNET, which interconnected supercomputers from five universities: Princeton; Cornell; the University of California at San Diego; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and the University of Pittsburgh. He also managed grants to link the nation's universities together into regional networks that connected to the backbone and so provided universal connectivity to the academic community. The NSFNET was compatible with and connected to the ARPANET network.

Wolff also conceived of a joint NSF-DARPA project called the Gigabit Testbed, which was designed to prove the feasibility of IP networking at gigabit speeds. In 1994 he left NSF and joined Cisco, where he helped with projects such as Internet2 and Abilene. His career at Cisco began as business development manager for the Academic Research and Technology Initiative program, where he helped advance the University Research Project (URP), which supported academic research candidates with grants to further networking technology.

He has served as interim Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Internet2, a role he took on March 31, 2011. Among his major awards, in 2002 Wolff was recognized with the Postel Award, which is given each year to a person who has made outstanding contributions to the data communications community. The award entails a presentation of a crystal and 20,000 dollars. Upon his receiving the award, Internet Society (ISOC) President and CEO Lynn St. Amour said that he had helped transform the Internet from an activity that served the specific goals of the research community to a worldwide enterprise which has energized scholarship and commerce throughout the world. In 1994 the ISOC also recognized Wolff for his courage and leadership in advancing the Internet.