Radia Perlman

Radia Joy Perlman (/ˈreɪdiə/; born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet". Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization: for example, enabling today's link-state routing protocols, to be more robust, scalable, and easy to manage.

Perlman was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for contributions to Internet routing and bridging protocols. She holds over 100 issued patents. She was elected to the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014, and to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016. She received lifetime achievement awards from USENIX in 2006 and from the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCOMM in 2010.

More recently she has invented the TRILL protocol to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning trees, allowing Ethernet to make optimal use of bandwidth. As of 2022, she was a Fellow at Dell Technologies.