Colin Dixon is a Facebook engineer working on the Public Safety Engineering team in Washington, DC and occasional Lecturer at the University of Maryland. Before that he was the Chair of OpenDaylight‘s Technical Steering Committee and a Distinguished Engineer at Brocade. Even earlier, he was a researcher at IBM Research’s Austin Lab.

His work has spanned research, building large-scale open source software, and developing products with a focus on distributed systems, networking, operating systems, and security.

He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2011 working under Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishamurthy. His dissertation “The Network as a Platform” looked at how to use software to build networked systems that would now be called Network Function Virtualization (End to the Middle) and the Internet of Things (HomeOS).

When not sitting in front of a computer, he is usually spending time with his wife and two kids. He still occasionally makes it into the wilderness for an ultralight backpacking trip—a hobby he picked up from his Dad, who co-founded the backpacking magazine Backpacking Light.