Paul Mockapetris is best known as the creator of the Domain Name System (DNS), and wrote the first implementation of SMTP, the Internet’s mail protocol . At present, he is a director and Chief Scientist at Threatstop, a realtime threat prevention service.

He was chair of an ICANN Strategic Panel, Chief Scientist and board member of Nominum, CTO at Urban Media, Siara, Fiberlane, and Software.com and director of engineering at @Home. He has been IETF chair, program manager at ARPA, and did 15 years of research at the USC Information Sciences Institute, 10 years at UC Irvine with the DCS project, and 4 years at MIT with the Architecture Machine Group before it became the Media Lab.

He received his learner’s permits in Physics and Electrical Engineering from the MIT in 1971, and a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from UC Irvine. He is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and is Doctor Honoris Causa of the Miguel Hernandez and Ramon Llull Universities. He is the recipient of the ACM Software System Award, IEEE Internet award and the ACM Sigcomm award, and is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and the US National Academy of Engineering.