Steve Crocker, Ph.D.

Dr. Crocker is CEO and co-founder of Shinkuro, Inc., an Internet research and development company building tools for cooperation and collaboration across the Internet and government sponsored projects in Internet security.  He is chair of the ICANN Board of Directors.

Dr. Crocker has been involved in the Internet since its inception.  In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, while he was a graduate student at UCLA, he was part of the team that developed the protocols for the Arpanet and laid the foundation for today’s Internet.  He organized the Network Working Group, which was the forerunner of the modern Internet Engineering Task Force, initiated the Request for Comment (RFC) series of notes through which protocol designs are documented and shared, and laid the foundation for the open architectural structure of the Internet Protocols.  For this work, Dr. Crocker was awarded the 2002 IEEE Internet Award.  He remained active in the Internet standards work through the IETF and IAB and served as the first security area director on the Internet Engineering Steering Group from 1989 to 1994.  In 2012 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Dr. Crocker experience includes research management at DARPA, USC/ISI and The Aerospace Corporation, vice president of Trusted Information Systems, and co-founder of CyberCash, Inc. and Longitude Systems, Inc.

Dr. Crocker earned his BA in math and PhD in computer science at UCLA, and studied artificial intelligence at MIT.  He has an honorary doctorate from the University of San Martin des Porres in Lima, Perú.