Guru
Parulkar has been in the field
of networking for close to 20 years and has worked in academia,
startups, a
large company, and a top tier venture capital firm. He joined National
Science Foundation (NSF) as a Program Director (October 2003) in its
then newly created Computer and Network Systems
Division.
Guru came to NSF to work with the broader
research community and together make
something “significant” happen. Highlights of his first year at
NSF include
Guru’s
success in the world of startups includes Growth Networks that he
co-founded
with Jon Turner and Jerry Cox and served as its CTO and Director.
Growth
Networks is notable for many reasons including the following:
Guru
co-founded a couple of more
high tech startups in the general area of networking, wireless and
multimedia
systems. These startups were funded and incubated by top tier venture
firms
such as New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Sequoia Capital in Silicon
Valley.
He also served as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at NEA during
2001. He
continues to serve as a technical advisor to several startups.
At
Cisco Guru led working groups on
the system architecture and performance modeling of the next generation
core
router to help get Growth Networks technology absorbed in Cisco’s
products. He
also worked in the New Markets and Technologies group of Cisco’s
Business
Development organization.
Prior
to startups, Guru was a
Professor of Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis
from 1987
to 1999. Highlights of this tenure include the following
His
other PhD students include James
Sterbenz, Christos Papadopoulos, and Fengming Gong.
All his students continue to be active in research and industry and
make
significant contributions.
Highlights
of Guru’s professional
services include ACM SIGCOMM’99 PC Co-Chair, NOSSDAV’97 PC Chair,
ACM/IEEE
Transaction on Networking Technical and Publications Editor, IEEE
Network
Editor, and Co-Editor IEEE JSAC special issue on Gigabit Networking.
Guru
received Ph.D. in Computer
Science from the University of Delaware in 1987 (advisor: Professor
Dave
Farber). At the time UDEL was at the center of exciting developments in
networking primarily due to Dave Farber and Dave Mills among others.
These
happenings had a profound effect on Guru’s thinking and later career.
The
highlights are:
Guru
is a recipient of an alumni
outstanding achievement award and Frank A. Pehrson Graduate Student
Achievement
award in Computer and information Sciences from the University of
Delaware.
Guru’s
accomplishments are mostly a
result of great people that he was fortunate enough to work with (or to
be
around). These include Dave
Farber,
Jon Turner, Jerry Cox, Ron Bernal, Dan Lenoski, George Varghese, Doug Schmidt, Adarsh Sethi, Paul Amer, Gary Delp, Bob Caviness, Dave Mills, Mike Miller,
and of
course a bunch of very good students.
You
are welcome to an academic
style web page (somewhat
dated) for more details.