Michael Freedman

Short Bio

Michael J. Freedman is the Robert E. Kahn Professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. He is also the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, building a category-defining relational database and cloud platform for time-series data, which has raised more than $180 million from top VC investors (NEA, Benchmark, Redpoint, Tiger Global, and others). His work broadly focuses on distributed systems, networking, and security.

Freedman developed CoralCDN (a decentralized content distribution network serving millions of daily users) and Ethane (which formed the basis for the OpenFlow / software-defined networking architecture). He co-founded Illuminics Systems around IP geolocation and intelligence, which was acquired by Quova (now part of Neustar). Freedman is also a technical advisor to Blockstack, building a more decentralized Internet leveraging the blockchain.

Honors include the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, ACM Fellow, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, given by President Obama), SIGCOMM, ICFP, and TCC Test of Time Awards, Caspar Bowden Award for Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, DARPA Computer Science Study Group membership, and multiple award publications. Prior to joining Princeton in 2007, he received his Ph.D. in computer science from NYU's Courant Institute and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees from MIT.