Robert Kahn

Robert Elliot Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, together with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol, known together as TCP/IP, the foundational communication protocols that make the modern Internet possible. Kahn earned his PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1964 and worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman, MIT and Bell Labs before joining DARPA Information Processing Techniques Office, where his work on internetworking took shape. Since 1986 he has served as chairman, chief executive officer and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, an organization he founded to support research into the National Information Infrastructure. Kahn shared the ACM Turing Award with Cerf in 2004 for pioneering work on internetworking, including the Internet basic communication protocols, and for inspired leadership in networking, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.