Bob Metcalfe will deliver the keynote address at the Cockrell School's Spring 2012 Commencement Ceremony Friday, May 18, at 7 p.m. at the Frank Erwin Center.
Metcalfe, a national technology medalist and inventor of Ethernet, joined the Cockrell School in January 2011 as professor of innovation, Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise and professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Bob Metcalfe
"The addition of Bob to our leadership team has significantly advanced our commitment to innovation and helped provide our students an entrepreneurial education," said Cockrell School of Engineering Dean Gregory L. Fenves. "Bob is a visionary for the role of innovation and I know our graduating class of 2012 will be inspired to leave UT and do great things."
A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Metcalfe brought with him a wealth of experiences and career contributions to the Cockrell School. He was a partner of Polaris Venture Partners since 2001, where he continues to advise the Massachusetts-based firm as a venture partner. During the 1990s, Metcalfe was publisher of InfoWorld and wrote an Internet column with half a million weekly readers. During the 1980s, Metcalfe founded IPOed, and grew the billion-dollar computer networking company, 3Com Corp., which merged with Hewlett-Packard in 2010. In the 1970s, Metcalfe worked in the Computer Science Laboratory of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where he invented today's local-area networking standard, Ethernet. Metcalfe also served as a consulting associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University (1975-83), where he taught early courses in distributed computing.
Now at UT, Metcalfe has completed his second semester co-teaching 1 Semester Startup, an interdisciplinary entrepreneurship practicum for undergraduates already on startup teams. The class aims to help advance student startups by teaching fundamentals of company formation, but mostly by connecting the teams into networks of real world resources. Metcalfe has helped facilitate guest speakers such as Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell, National Instruments Corp. CEO James Truchard, former MIT Media Lab Director Frank Moss and others.
"Engineers make the world go round, and I mean especially in that virtuous circle of freedom and prosperity which is America," Metcalfe said. "I am very excited to have this chance to send off Cockrell's latest crop of engineers and to encourage them at least to consider being founderati in some technology startups. It is a high calling to operate the machinery of Free Enterprise."
Metcalfe holds two bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and industrial management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master's degree in applied mathematics and a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University.
