Thomson Leighton

Tom Leighton is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In September 1998, Prof. Leighton co-founded Akamai Technologies, the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online. Prof. Leighton serves as Akamai's Chief Scientist and as a member of Akamai's Board of Directors. Prof. Leighton's technology achievements at Akamai earned him recognition as one of the Top 10 Technology Innovators in U.S. News and World Report .

Prof. Leighton is one of the world's preeminent authorities on algorithms for network applications. He holds numerous patents involving content delivery, network protocols, algorithms, cryptography, and digital rights management, and has published more than 100 research papers in the areas of parallel algorithms and architectures, distributed computing, communication protocols for networks, combinatorial optimization, probabilistic methods, VLSI computation and design, sequential algorithms, and graph theory. He is also the author of two books, including a leading text on parallel algorithms and architectures.

During the course of his career, he has served on dozens of government, industrial, and academic review committees, program committees, and editorial boards. Prof. Leighton is the former two-term chair of the 2,000-member Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Complexity Theory (SIGACT); and a former two-term editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM, the nation's premier journal for computer science research. He is currently a member of the Editorial Boards of Algorithmica, ACM Transactions on Algorithms, Internet Mathematics and Combinatorica.

From 2003 to 2005, Prof. Leighton served as the Chairman of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) subcommittee on Cyber Security. In February of 2005, PITAC issued a report to the President entitiled " Cyber Security: A Crisis in Prioritization".

Prof. Leighton is a Fellow for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004, he was elected into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for contributions to the design of networks and circuits and for technology for Web content delivery and in 2006, he received the ACM-SIGACT Distinguished Service Prize. In 2008, he was elected member to the National Academy of Science.

In 2002, Prof. Leighton was recognized by his alma mater as Princeton University's seventh Gordon Wu Distinguished Lecturer. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton with a B.S. in Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT.