Nick McKeown has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University since 1995. In 2005 he started the Clean Slate Program at Stanford, which with Martin Casado and Scott Shenker led to "Software Defined Networking". He co-founded Nicira (now part of VMware), Abrizio and Nemo ("Network Memory", now part of Cisco), as well as ONF, ON.Lab and P4.org. In 2013 he co-founded Barefoot Networks, where he is Chairman and Chief Scientist. His current passion is to move the network data-plane from fixed-function hardware up and into software where it belongs. He hopes this will foster much faster innovation in networking, and finally hand over the keys to those who own and operate networks, to customize them to best suit their needs.

Nick is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK). He received the British Computer Society Lovelace Medal (2005), the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award (2009), the ACM Sigcomm Lifetime Achievement Award (2012), and an Honorary Doctorate from ETH (Zurich, 2014).