Roy Levin

About

Roy Levin is a former Distinguished Engineer and Managing Director of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, which he co-founded in August 2001 and led until the lab was closed in September 2014. The lab included approximately 65 researchers in distributed computing and related fields, spanning the technical spectrum from theory to practice.

Before joining Microsoft, Levin was a senior researcher and subsequently director of the Digital/Compaq Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California. His research (1984-1996) included operating systems, distributed computing, and tools for large-scale software development. Before joining Digital, Levin was a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where he was a principal developer and project co-leader of the experimental programming environment Cedar. He was also a developer of Grapevine, a landmark electronic mail system.

In retirement, Levin serves as co-chair of ACM Awards, which includes the Turing Award and approximately twenty others. He also serves on the ACM’s History Committee with a focus on oral history. In his non-computing life, Levin enjoys travel, classical music, theater, and playing with his grandchildren. He is the board president of a small chamber music ensemble, the Ives Collective.

Levin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1977 and his B.S. in Mathematics from Yale University. He is a Fellow of the ACM and a former chair of its Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS). He has authored or co-authored approximately 25 technical publications and several patents.