George Varghese is a Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. His research interests center around network algorithmics (building fast routers) and network verification (building tools for static and dynamic verification of operational networks).
He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from MIT after working at DEC designing DECNET protocols and products, including the bridge architecture and Gigaswitch. From 1993-1999, he was a professor at Washington University, and at UCSD from 1999 to 2013. He was the Distinguished Visitor in the computer science department at Stanford University from 2010-2011. From 2012-2016, he was a Principal Researcher and Partner at Microsoft Research.
Together with colleagues, he has 22 patents awarded in the general field of Network Algorithmics. Several of the algorithms he helped develop appear in commercial systems including Linux (timing wheels), the Cisco GSR (DRR), and Microsoft Windows (IP lookups). He helped design the hardware lookup engine for Procket's 40 Gbps router. He has been on the advisory boards of Memoir, Jibe, Sanera, and SwitchOn, and consulted for ST MicroElectronics, AOL, and Fujitsu. In May 2004, he co-founded NetSift Inc., where he was President and CTO. NetSift was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2005. His book "Network Algorithmics" on fast router and endnode implementations was published in 2004 by Morgan-Kaufman.
He has written over 100 papers, mostly on networking, but also on computer architecture, genomics, and databases. After Dijkstra's early work, he helped develop general techniques for self-stabilization, an abstraction of a strong network fault-tolerance property. His Erdos number is 2 via mathematicians Ron and Fan Graham.
He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017. He won the IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumni Award in 2015, the IEEE Kobayashi Award for Computers and Communications in 2014, and the SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievment Award for networking in 2014. He has been a Fellow of the ACM since 2002 and an ONR Young Investigator. He was PC co-chair of SIGCOMM 2012 and general co-chair of SIGCOMM 2001. He won the UCSD Best Teacher Award (2001) and the Graduate Mentor of the Year Award at Washington University (1997). With colleagues, he has won best paper awards at SIGCOMM (2014), ANCS (2013), OSDI (2008) and PODC (1996), and the IETF Applied Networking Prize (2013).