Nick McKeown is an award-winning scientist, an emeritus professor at Stanford University in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. Nick was also appointed to the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology in February 2025, where he advises the government on high-level science and technology priorities, particularly focusing on AI chip design, semiconductor strategy, and photonics to boost UK innovation.
He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern computer networking, especially in Internet architecture, high-performance switching, and software-defined networking (SDN).
Nick’s early work includes his research efforts at Hewlett-Packard Labs in the late 1980s in the United Kingdom. In the United States, he helped architect Cisco’s GSR 12000 router, a major commercial backbone router. This early phase shaped his lifelong focus on how to make networks faster, scalable, and programmable.
Over the years, Nick’s research group The McKeown Group has focused on overcoming barriers to network innovation by creating platforms for experimentation, demonstrating new ideas on top of these platforms, and opening these platforms to the world. This includes Internet router designs, crossbar scheduling algorithms for switched backplanes, lookup algorithms and novel memories. The core philosophy underpinning Nick’s research argues that networks should be flexible, programmable systems, not rigid hardware pipelines.
In 2025, Nick was awarded the Marconi Prize in recognition for his fundamental contributions to high-performance switches and routers and to SDN and for transferring these contributions into widespread practice. He co-invented SDN through the Ethane project and OpenFlow protocol with Martin Casado and Scott Shenker, introduced the idea of programmable forwarding planes, and challenged traditional network architecture. This fundamentally changed networking, from hardware-driven to software-controlled infrastructure.
Nick’s influence extends to designing open-source platforms like NetFPGA and the P4 programming language, empowering researchers and developers around the world.
An entrepreneur, he repeatedly turned academic ideas into industry-defining products. Nick has started technology companies in Silicon Valley, including Nicira Networks, alongside Casado and Shenker, a California-based company working on network virtualization, subsequently acquired by VMWare for $1.26 billion in July 2012.
As of 2026, Nick’s research team is working on AI fabrics and low-cost underwater vehicles for oceanographic research.
Nick earned a master's degree in 1992 and PhD in 1995 both from the University of California at Berkeley.