SEAS Professor of the Practice Jim Waldo named University CTO

Jim Waldo, currently Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been named as the University’s Chief Technology Officer, effective June 6.

In his role as chief technology officer, Waldo will be responsible for the architecture and implementation of the Harvard University technology environment in support of research, teaching, and administration.

He will lead the creation of technology standards and practices that position us to flexibly meet the needs the Harvard community.

In addition to teaching courses in distributed computing, and privacy and technology at SEAS, Waldo has been a senior staff engineer at VMWare Inc., a distinguished engineer and principal investigator at Sun Laboratories and Sun Microsystems, as well as a consulting engineer at Hewlett-Packard and elsewhere.

Waldo has also done research and product development in the areas of medical sensing, object-oriented programming and systems, distributed computing, and user environments.

He edited the book The Evolution of C++: Language Design in the Marketplace of Ideas (MIT Press), and was one of the authors of The Jini Specification (Addison Wesley). He is also the author of Java: The Good Part (O’Reilly).

Waldo is an alumnus of University of Utah (B.S. in philosophy, M.A. in linguistics, M.A. in philosophy) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Ph.D. in philosophy). He has an outstanding breadth of skills and is the holder of numerous patents, and the author of numerous publications.