Former Vice President Al Gore and Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, are among the featured speakers for the NSFNET 35th Anniversary Celebratory Virtual Event on Tuesday, Dec. 8th from 1 pm to 2:45 pm EST.

Other featured speakers include:

• Dennis Jennings, former First Program Director for Networking at the National Science Foundation
• Howard Pfeffer, President and CEO of Internet2
• Andrew Sullivan, CEO of the Internet Society
• Margaret Martonosi, Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation

Learn more about the featured speakers by reading their biographies below.

Al Gore

Former Vice President Al Gore is the cofounder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, and the founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit devoted to solving the climate crisis. He is also a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a member of Apple Inc.’s board of directors.

Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, 1980, and 1982 and to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the 45th vice president of the United States on January 20, 1993, and served eight years. 

He is the author of the #1 New York Times best-sellers “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Assault on Reason,” and the best-sellers “Earth in the Balance,” “Our Choice: A Plan To Solve the Climate Crisis,” “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change,” and most recently, The New York Times best-seller “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.”

He is the subject of the documentary movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won two Oscars in 2006 — and a second documentary in 2017, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” In 2007, Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”

Vint Cerf

Cerf is Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He contributes to global policy development and the continued spread of the Internet. Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and on the faculty of Stanford University.

Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007 and has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998. Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992-1995.

Cerf is a Foreign Member of the British Royal Society and Swedish Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the British Computer Society, the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, the Worshipful Company of Stationers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

He has served as President of the Association for Computing Machinery, chairman of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), and completed a term as Chairman of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. President Obama appointed him to the National Science Board in 2012.

Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, the Franklin Medal, Officer of the Legion d’Honneur and 29 honorary degrees. In December 1994, People magazine identified Cerf as one of that year’s  “25 Most Intriguing People.”

His personal interests include fine wine, gourmet cooking and science fiction. Cerf and his wife, Sigrid, were married in 1966 and have two sons, David and Bennett.  

Dennis Jennings

As the first Program Director for Networking at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1985-86, Dr. Dennis Jennings was responsible for the design and development of the NSFnet Program. Dr. Jennings developed a vision of an open network of networks – an Internet – designed to serve all of U.S. research and higher education.

Dr. Jennings’ selection of the DARPA TCP/IP Internet protocol suite, and his insistence on its deployment across NSFnet, was a key contribution. The NSFnet Program stimulated the development of many regional research and education networks, and it connected them to campus networks, to supercomputing centers and their networks, and to the first (interim) NSFnet backbone (and later to U.S. federal agency networks, and international research and education networks). NSFnet eventually became a major part of the Internet backbone.

Howard Pfeffer

Howard Pfeffer began his tenure as Internet2 President and CEO on June 12, 2017.

Howard Pfeffer is a Technology Executive with over 30 years of experience in networking, systems and software engineering and is known for helping to pioneer the development of Broadband Internet, Voice over IP, Community Wi-Fi, and Business Services in the cable industry. He was most recently the Senior Vice President of the Broadband Technology Group at Time Warner Cable. In that role he led the architecture, engineering and development of the telecommunications infrastructure for Residential and Business Services. Pfeffer is a seasoned leader in the broadband industry and he possesses deep technical knowledge and an excellent track record of partnering and collaboration to convert technical capabilities into successful business outcomes.

When Pfeffer joined Time Warner in 1995, he was one of the original members of a small team that helped pioneer cable broadband efforts. By developing new IP technologies, Pfeffer and his team helped to increase speed and reliability of Time Warner’s infrastructure that ultimately helped provide user-centric services across the organization.

Prior to his numerous leadership roles at Time Warner Cable, Pfeffer held engineering and technology positions at organizations such as America Online and Road Runner. Over the course of his career he has been awarded multiple U.S. patents.

Pfeffer earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan joined the Internet Society as President and Chief Executive Officer in September 2018.

He has worked on Internet infrastructure and standards since 2001. In 2012 he joined Dyn (later, Oracle Dyn) to establish Dyn Labs and then to manage the DNS development and architecture departments. His activities in this area led to him being appointed to the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) in 2013. His IAB colleagues elected him Chair in 2015 and 2016.

Andrew’s IAB tenure coincided with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship transition. Andrew was deeply involved in the community’s efforts around the transition and played a central role in its eventual success. His expertise in the area was acknowledged when he was invited to testify about the transition to the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

Before joining Dyn, Andrew was a principal contributor to the Variant Issues Project (VIP) undertaken by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The VIP was an effort to bring together several different, previous efforts in support of internationalized domain names. The VIP was made of teams from all over the world, working on five major writing systems. Andrew worked with all of them to try to gather together the needs of the many different linguistic communities of the world, and the Internet’s critical value as an interoperable, neutral platform. The positive results of the VIP are being expressed every day through Internet-scale internationalized domain names.

At the beginning of Andrew’s Internet infrastructure career, he worked to launch the .info Internet top-level domain in 2001. Because of that experience, he was part of the team that collaborated with the Internet Society to launch Public Interest Registry, and take over the operation of the .org top-level domain. These registries used PostgreSQL, an advanced open-source database management system. Because of his work in this area Andrew organized the PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit, held at Ryerson University in Toronto in 2006.

Andrew was born in Buffalo, NY, USA to Canadian parents, and has lived most of his life in Canada. He holds a Baccalaureate of Arts (Hons) from the University of Ottawa, and a Master of Arts from McMaster University, both in Philosophy. His graduate work on the philosophy of economics led him to his interest in free/open source software and open Internet protocols and standards. He carries that interest and passion forward to his position at the Internet Society.

Margaret Martonosi

Margaret Martonosi is the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Assistant Director for Computer and information Science and Engineering (CISE). With an annual budget of more than $1B, the CISE directorate at NSF has the mission to uphold the Nation’s leadership in scientific discovery and engineering innovation through its support of fundamental research and education in computer and information science and engineering as well as transformative advances in research cyberinfrastructure.

While at NSF, Dr. Martonosi is on leave from Princeton University where she is the Hugh Trumbull Adams ’35 Professor of Computer Science. Dr. Martonosi’s research interests are in computer architecture and hardware-software interface issues in both classical and quantum computing systems. Dr. Martonosi is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).