Biography

Dr. Terry Gray

Until his retirement in December 2014, Terry Gray was Associate Vice President for Technology Strategy and Chief Technology Architect in the UW Information Technology organization at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. As such, he served as technology actuary, advisor, and therapist for the organization. He was also an Affiliate Professor in the UW Computer Science & Engineering Department. Earlier, Dr. Gray was UW's Associate VP for IT Infrastructure, and for fifteen years, Director of Networks and Distributed Computing.

Prior to joining UW in 1988, he was Vice President of Engineering for the Bridge Communications Division of 3Com Corporation. Earlier professional experience includes work at Bell Laboratories, Ampex Corporation, and many years in the UCLA Computer Science Department, first as a graduate student, and later in both faculty and staff roles, including running UCLA's Center for Experimental Computer Science and later directing its Distributed Systems Laboratory. His education includes a BS in Electronic Engineering from Northrop Institute of Technology in 1967 and a PhD in Computer Science from UCLA in 1978.

For over 30 years his principal technical focus was distributed system architecture, but he has also written about technology management, computer security, software engineering, distributed operating system design, network job control, and electronic messaging systems. Prior to his last assignment at UW, focusing on technology strategy and architecture, his primary responsibility was to foster development of a high-availability Internet-oriented network computing infrastructure for the University. In 1997 he also developed and taught the first Network Systems course for the CS&E department's Professional Masters program.

In the 1990's, he oversaw the development of the seminal Pine message system, chaired the IETF working group to standardize the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), and was instrumental in bringing advanced Internet connectivity to the Pacific NorthWest, first by overseeing the design and operation of NorthWestNet (the original Internet service provider in the region), and later by leading the engineering team responsible for creating the Pacific/NorthWest Gigapop. Gray also participated in the creation of Internet-2 in 1996, and later served on the Internet-2 Quality of Service, End-to-End Performance, and Security-At-Line-Speed (SALSA) working groups. He has also contributed to two invitation-only workshops on rethinking the future of the Internet, one sponsored by Internet-2 and the other by Microsoft.

During 1999 he became one of the prime movers behind UW's ground-breaking "Internet HDTV" experiments, culminating in systems to send uncompressed 1.5Gbps HD video streams over the Internet. In the following decade, network security became a major focus. Contributions in this area include UW's "Network Security Credo", and overseeing development of logical (topology independent) firewalls.

Beginning in 2007, his primary mission was to help UW prepare for the coming mobility, consumerization, cloud computing, and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) revolutions, through the lens of reducing barriers to collaboration. During Gray's last few years at UW, a growing fraction of his time was focused on strategic leadership mentoring and applying "design for diagnosis" principles to organization (as well as systems) development.

In a previous life as a young electronics officer, Gray was perhaps best known for commuting to Naval Station San Diego in his dune buggy with the "flower power" paint job.