Radia Perlman - Newest Sun Fellow!

November 15, 2006- In recognition of her considerable technical expertise and profound impact on the fields of network security and routing, Radia Perlman has been named a Sun Fellow.

Radia is best known for her invention of the Spanning Tree Algorithm, a key technology used in local-area networks, and for innovations that have made link state routing protocols robust, efficient, and scalable. She has more than 80 patents issued with more pending, and her two books ("Interconnections" and "Network Security") are widely used as university text books and as references by engineers.

Her many awards include the USENIX 2006 lifetime achievement award, SVIPLA 2004 Inventor of the Year award, and an honorary Doctorate from KTH (the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden). She was named by both Network World (2006) and Data Communications Magazine (1992, 1997) as one of the most influential people in networking. She has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.

At Sun Labs, Radia is currently working on a large project which is a successor to spanning tree bridging. Other investigations are focused on the creation of new technology permitting files to be deleted irrecoverably on a specified date. In addition, she is exploring a design for data recovery (including expired files) that is inexpensive, fast, and easily manageable.

About Sun Fellows:
Highly prestigious, the title of Sun Fellow is the most senior rank that can be attained within Sun's engineering organization. Sun Fellows help guide Sun's technical direction, identify new opportunities and advise the management team on technical issues. Radia's appointment adds her to the elite group of Fellows at Sun—Nick Aneshansley, Richard Dee, Whitfield Diffie, James Gosling, Jim Hughes, Tim Marsland, Jim Mitchell, Mike Splain, Bob Sproull, Guy Steele, Ivan Sutherland and Marc Tremblay.

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