Scott Shenker

Shenker received his Sc.B. in physics from Brown University in 1978, and his PhD in physics from University of Chicago in 1983. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the same university. After working as a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University, he joined the research staff at Xerox PARC. He left PARC in 1998 to help found the AT&T Center for Internet Research, which was later renamed the ICSI Center for Internet Research (ICIR). In 1995, Shenker contributed to the field of energy-efficient processor scheduling, co-authoring a paper on deadline-based scheduling with Frances Yao and Alan Demers. From 1995 to 2001, while working at Xerox PARC and later ICSI, he was an adjunct associate professor at the University of Southern California. In 2002, Shenker joined the Berkeley faculty and received the SIGCOMM Award in recognition of his "contributions to Internet design and architecture, to fostering research collaboration, and as a role model for commitment and intellectual rigor in networking research". In 2006, he received the IEEE Internet Award for "contributions towards an understanding of resource sharing on the Internet." He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2016 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the brother of string theorist Stephen Shenker. Shenker is a leader in the movement toward software-defined networking (SDN). He is the co-founder of the Open Networking Foundation and of Nicira Networks. In June 2021, Berkeley announced that Shenker had donated $25 million toward the university's computing and data science initiatives, making him and colleague Ion Stoica two of Berkeley's top benefactors. In late 2025, he was announced by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as the recipient of the 2026 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. He is one of the inventors of dominant resource fairness. == Publications (selection) ==