Colin Dixon is a senior software engineer at Meta, where he works on trust and safety. Based in London, and previously in Washington, DC, his work has spanned child-safety systems, large-scale measurement of safety effectiveness, privacy compliance, and the engineering behind content-moderation regulation such as the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

Earlier, he was the Chair of OpenDaylight‘s Technical Steering Committee (where he helped guide the open-source SDN controller across dozens of companies and hundreds of developers), occasional Lecturer at the University of Maryland and a Distinguished Engineer at Brocade. Even earlier, he was a researcher at IBM Research’s Austin Lab. This work included 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 Krishnamurthy. 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.