Greg Lavender of Mountain View, who earned his master’s and doctoral in computer science from Virginia Tech in 1988 and 1993, respectively, is a 2014 inductee into Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering Academy of Engineering Excellence, joining an elite group of 126 individuals out of more than 60,000 living engineering alumni.
The Academy of Engineering Excellence was founded in 1999 by F. William Stephenson, past dean of the college of engineering, and the College’s Advisory Board.
The inductees are engineering graduates of Virginia Tech who have made continuous and admirable engineering or leadership contributions during their careers.
Currently, Lavender is a chief technology officer and managing director at Citigroup, a global cloud computing architecture and technology infrastructure engineering organization.
His fascination with computers began at an early age.
Before 10, Lavender’s father introduced him to his first computer, an IBM mainframe; at 16 he took his first computer programing class; and at 18, he was writing programs on a Commodore PC and logging into large mainframe computers to run and test his programs.
“I was captivated by the digital logic underlying the machine and the ability of the human mind to control it by imagining ways to write programs,” Lavender said.
For his undergraduate studies, Lavender attended the University of Georgia, initially as a physics major, but switched to applied mathematics because computer science courses were taught in the mathematics department.
In 1983, he completed his bachelor’s with magna cum laude honors and assembled his first microcomputer using a computer electronics kit called a HeathKit. Telecommunications became Lavender’s primary interest.
He taught himself basic data communications protocols and programmed his computer to connect over telephone lines to bulletin boards and dial-‐up mainframe computers.
He began his professional career as an entry-‐level network software engineer for TRW, Inc., of Washington D.C.,an aerospace and systems engineering defense contractor.
He and two recent college grads, considered cheap labor,were given“non-‐critical” work on are search projec ton ARPANet. Ironically,this was the precursor to today’s global Internet.
Later, Lavender resigned from his post with TRW and headed to Virginia Tech pursue a master’s in computer science with a graduate fellowship, under the direction of Dick Nance,a professor of computer science. He also performed research under Dennis Kafura, also a professor of computer science,whose interests in systems and software engineering were analogous with his own.
In 1993, during the time of his doctoral pursuit, he spent time at Microelectronics & Computer Technology Corp.(MCC), in Austin Texas as a visiting researcher in the Networking and Distributed Systems Laboratory where he conducted advanced R&D on concurrent object-‐oriented virtual machine architectures, network protocols,and distributed systems.
In 1994, Lavender co-‐founded ISODE, Ltd.,a networking software company that pioneered a family of early Internet protocols and servers, implementing protocols that are in use today on the global Internet.
He sold the company and almost simultaneously, co-‐founded and operated as the chief scientist for Critical Angle, Inc.,which was acquired by Innosoft International, then by Sun Microsystems in 2000.
From 2000-‐2004, Lavender split his time between Austin and Silicon Valley where he continued to teach and perform research in Austin, while serving as the senior director of software engineering for Sun Microsystems, leading product development and managing 450 employees in California, France, and India.
In the spring of 2004, he accepted the full-time position as the associate chairman for academics in the computer science department in Austin.
Over the following four years, he returned to Sun Microsystems becoming vice president of operating systems engineering, then to Oracle Corporation following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and finally to Cisco Systems as corporate vice president of network software engineering.
Virginia Tech’s computer science department named Lavender its distinguished alumnus in 2010.
When the entrepreneur isn’t globetrotting or researching, Lavender is cycling, a stress-‐relieving hobby he started in 2008 while residing in mild-‐weathered, California, where now,he easily puts in 100 miles over a week’s time.
--Information from Virginia Tech
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