Farnam Jahanian () is an Iranian-American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and higher education leader. He serves as the 10th president of Carnegie Mellon University.
Early life and education
Farnam Jahanian was born in Teheran, Iran in 1961. He emigrated to the United States in 1977 at the age of 16 and completed high school in San Antonio, Texas.
Jahanian received a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1982. He earned a master's degree in 1987 and a PhD in computer science in 1989 from the University of Texas at Austin. After receiving his PhD, Jahanian began his career at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he was a research staff member from 1989 to 1993.
Career
University of Michigan
In 1993, Jahanian joined the faculty at the University of Michigan where he would spend the next 21 years. He held the Edward S. Davidson Collegiate Professorship in the College of Engineering and served as Chair for Computer Science and Engineering from 2007 to 2011 and the Director of the Software Systems Laboratory from 1997 to 2000.
His research spans distributed computing, network security and network protocols and architectures. His research has been sponsored by NSF, DHS, DARPA, NSA, ONR as well as companies like Cisco, Intel, Google, Boeing, VeriSign, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. One of Jahanian’s most cited papers is "Safety analysis of timing properties in real-time systems."
While at the University of Michigan, Jahanian led several large-scale research projects that studied the growth and scalability of the Internet infrastructure, which ultimately transformed how cyber threats are addressed by Internet Service Providers. In the late 1990s, his research team, including former students, Craig Labovitz and G. Robert Malan, demonstrated fundamental limitations in the core routing architecture of the Internet by uncovering the fragility of the underlying routing infrastructure. The group’s seminal work on Internet routing stability and convergence served as a catalyst for significant changes in commercial Internet routing software implementation and impacted routing policies employed by Internet Service Providers worldwide. The centerpiece of this work was recognized with an ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award in 2008.
Anticipating the emergence of increasingly complex, widely distributed cyber-attacks on IP-based networks, long before terms such as “distributed denial of service” and “zero-day worms” entered the mainstream, Jahanian’s research team led an effort to develop new techniques that combine network topology information and traffic flow statistics to detect, backtrack and filter DDoS attacks.
Arbor Networks
Jahanian’s contributions to Internet stability and security led to the successful commercialization of his research through Arbor Networks, which Jahanian co-founded with former UM graduate student G. Robert Malan in 2000.
Over a 10-year period, Jahanian led the research, co-founded the company, launched its flagship products, and upon his return to the University of Michigan, served as Chief Scientist and Chairman of Arbor Networks until its acquisition in 2010. Early contributors to Arbor Networks’ launch and growth include Craig Labovitz, Dug Song, Ted Julian, Paul Morville, Jon Arnold, Matt Smart, and Scott Iekel-Johnson.
At Arbor Networks, Jahanian and his team developed highly scalable, service provider-class solutions for protecting networks against distributed denial of service attacks, zero-day network threats and routing exploits. These Internet security solutions have been widely implemented by hundreds of Internet Service Providers, wireless carriers, cloud service providers and numerous mission-critical networks around the globe.
National Science Foundation
Jahanian led the National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering from 2011 to 2014. With the budget of over $900 million, he was responsible for directing programs and initiatives that support advances in research and cyber infrastructure, foster broad interdisciplinary collaborations, and contribute to the development of a computing and information technology workforce with skills essential to success in the increasingly competitive global market.