Stephen Wolff

Stephen South Wolff is one of the many fathers of the Internet. and its linking to the US Army's network of supercomputers.

In 1986, Wolff became Division Director for Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation and worked on commercializing the Internet by building a government-funded network that extended the ARPANET design into the civilian world, and spinning it off to the private sector.

In an era when network speeds of 155 mb/s were still under commercial development, Wolff and Ira Richer at DARPA jointly funded Bob Kahn's "Gigabit Testbeds" project that proved the feasibility of IP networking at gigabit speeds.

In 1994, Wolff left NSF and joined Cisco where he helped with projects such as Internet2 and the Abilene Network. Wolff's career at Cisco began as business development manager for the Academic Research and Technology Initiative program. There, Wolff helped advance the University Research Project (URP) which supports academic research candidates with grants to further networking technology. Also in 1994, Wolff joined the Board of Directors of the Internet Systems Consortium, on which he has served ever since. In 2014, Wolff was appointed to the Board of the DONA Foundation, a Swiss non-profit that encourages and supports the widespread use of persistent digital object identifiers.

Major awards In 2002 the Internet Society recognized Wolff with its Postel Award. When presenting the award, Internet Society (ISOC) President and CEO Lynn St. Amour said “…Steve helped transform the Internet from an activity that served the specific goals of the research community to a worldwide enterprise which has energized scholarship and commerce throughout the world.”

The Internet Society also recognized Wolff in 1994 for his courage and leadership in advancing the Internet.