Ian Foster is the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and a Senior Scientist and Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory, where he directs the Data Science and Learning Division.
He is widely recognized as a founder of grid computing, the distributed computing paradigm that laid the technical and conceptual groundwork for today’s multibillion-dollar cloud computing industry. His work on the Globus Toolkit, developed with collaborator Carl Kesselman, enabled scientists and engineers worldwide to share computing resources across institutional boundaries.
His career has been shaped by a single recurring problem: how to coordinate computation and communication across distances where the speed of light becomes a practical constraint. Whether designing protocols for globally distributed scientific instruments, architecting data centers, or exploring the limits of parallel computing, he has spent three decades wrestling with that physics.
His contributions have been recognized with the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance computing, the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal, the IEEE Internet Award, the ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award, and the IEEE Computer Society’s Babbage and Goode Awards. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, BCS, and IEEE.
Foster grew up in New Zealand, where distance was a fact of daily life. His childhood copies of Look and Learn magazine arrived by ship from England, weeks or months late. He later sailed across the Pacific, navigating by sextant, experiencing firsthand what it means to be truly beyond the reach of instantaneous communication.
He holds a BSc from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and a PhD from Imperial College London. He lives in Chicago.
Contact
foster [at] uchicago.edu — or see the University of Chicago faculty page.