Prior to joining UW in 1988, he was Vice President of Engineering for the Bridge Communications Division of 3Com Corporation. Earlier professional experience includes work at Bell Laboratories, Ampex Corporation, and many years in the UCLA Computer Science Department, first as a graduate student, and later in both faculty and staff roles. His education includes a BS in Electronic Engineering from Northrop Institute of Technology in 1967 and a PhD in Computer Science from UCLA in 1978.
For over 30 years his principal technical focus has been on distributed system architecture, but he has also published work in computer security, software engineering, distributed operating system design, network job control, and electronic messaging systems. Until his latest assignment, focusing on technology strategy and architecture, his primary responsibility at UW was to foster development of a high-availability Internet-oriented network computing infrastructure for the University. In 1997 he also developed and taught the first Network Systems course for the CS&E department's Professional Masters program.
Since the late 1980's, Dr. Gray has been a strong supporter of the Internet Engineering Task Force, and chaired the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) working group. He has been instrumental in bringing advanced Internet connectivity to the Pacific NorthWest, first by overseeing the design and operation of NorthWestNet (the original Internet service provider in the region), and more recently by leading the engineering team responsible for creating the Pacific/NorthWest Gigapop.
In 1996, Gray participated in the creation of Internet-2, and later served on the Internet-2 Quality of Service working group. During 1999 he became one of the prime movers behind UW's ground-breaking "Internet HDTV" experiments. In 2001 he was asked to serve on the planning committee and initial design team for the Internet-2 "End-to-End Peformance Initiative", where he focused on the need for "Finger Pointing Tools" to rapidly determine the cause of transient performance problems in a network computing environment. Since 1999, network security issues also began to be consume a growing fraction of his time. Contributions in this area include UW's "Network Security Credo", and overseeing development of logical (topology independent) firewalls. In 2003 he was asked to co-organize and present at the NSF/Internet-2 "Security @ Line Speed" workshop, and to help create a follow-on group called SALSA. He has also contributed to two invitation-only workshops on rethinking the future of the Internet, one sponsored by Internet-2 and the other by Microsoft.
His greatest moment of unwitting courage was as a young naval officer driving a dune buggy with a flower-print paint job to work every day at Naval Station San Diego during the late sixties.
For more detail, see:
http://staff.washington.edu/gray/resume.txt
and
http://www.washington.edu/uwtech/strategy.html