Researchers in computer systems, networking, security, databases, and programming languages

Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

Margaret Hamilton, born Margaret Heafield Hamilton in 1936, is an American computer scientist who led the MIT team that wrote the Apollo program's onboard flight software, credited with coining "software engineering."

Mark Raasveldt

Mark Raasveldt is the Dutch database researcher who co-created DuckDB at CWI Amsterdam and is co-founder and CTO of DuckLabs, lead architect of its execution engine.

Martin Fowler (software engineer)

Martin Fowler (born 1963) is a British software engineer, Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks, and author of Refactoring (1999) and a co-author of the 2001 Agile Manifesto.

Martin Kleppmann

Martin Kleppmann, British computer scientist and Cambridge Associate Professor, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications (2017, 2nd ed. 2026), co-founder of Rapportive and Automerge, and coiner of local-first software.

Martin Traverso

Martin Traverso, software engineer; co-creator of Presto (2012, Facebook) and its fork Trino, with Sundstrom, Phillips, and Hwang; co-founder of the Trino Software Foundation and CTO of Starburst Data.

Masatoshi Shima

Masatoshi Shima (嶋正利), born 1943 in Shizuoka, Japan, is a computer engineer who designed the logic of the Intel 4004, the 8080, and the Zilog Z80, sharing the 1997 Kyoto Prize.

Matei Zaharia

Matei Zaharia, Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, creator of Apache Spark (started 2009), cofounder and CTO of Databricks, and UC Berkeley EECS associate professor; RDD paper author, 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award winner, and recipient of the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing (announced April 2026).

Matt Housley

Matt Housley (Matthew Housley) is an American data engineer, University of Utah mathematics PhD, and co-author with Joe Reis of O'Reilly's Fundamentals of Data Engineering (2022); former CTO and co-founder of Ternary Data, now at Halfpipe Systems.

Maurice Herlihy

Maurice Herlihy is a computer scientist and An Wang Professor at Brown University who defined linearizability, proved the consensus hierarchy, introduced transactional memory, and won the Dijkstra Prize three times.

Maurice Wilkes

Sir Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010) was a British computer scientist who led the building of EDSAC, the first practical stored-program computer, at Cambridge in 1949, and invented microprogramming.

Maxime Beauchemin

Maxime Beauchemin (@mistercrunch) is a software engineer, original creator of Apache Airflow (2014, Airbnb) and Apache Superset (originally Caravel), founder and CEO of Preset, and now builder of the AI-agent orchestration platform Agor.

Melvin Conway

Melvin Conway is an American computer scientist whose 1968 paper "How Do Committees Invent?" gave rise to Conway's Law, the observation that system designs mirror the organizations that build them.

Mendel Rosenblum (scientist)

Mendel Rosenblum is an American computer scientist, a Stanford professor known for operating systems and virtualization research, who co-founded VMware in 1998 and served as its Chief Scientist.

Michael Armbrust

Michael Armbrust: American computer scientist, Databricks Distinguished Software Engineer, UC Berkeley PhD 2013. Lead developer of Spark SQL, Structured Streaming, and original creator of Delta Lake.

Michael Burrows (computer scientist)

Michael Burrows is a computer scientist who co-authored the 1994 Burrows–Wheeler transform, helped create the AltaVista search engine, and designed Google's Chubby lock service as a Distinguished Engineer.

Michael Carbin

Michael Carbin is an American computer scientist and MIT associate professor who heads the Programming Systems Group at CSAIL, known for running programs reliably on unreliable hardware.

Mike Cafarella

Mike Cafarella (Michael Cafarella) is an MIT CSAIL principal research scientist who co-created the Apache Nutch crawler and Hadoop distributed computing framework with Doug Cutting; University of Michigan professor 2009–2020, Lattice Data cofounder.

Mike Lesk

Mike Lesk, also known as Michael Lesk, is an American computer scientist who wrote Unix tools at Bell Labs, worked on information retrieval, and led digital library research.

Milind Kulkarni

Milind Kulkarni is a computer scientist who heads Purdue University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and studies compilers and runtimes for irregular parallel data.

Nancy Lynch

Nancy Lynch is an American computer scientist and NEC Professor at MIT who heads the Theory of Distributed Systems group, best known for the FLP impossibility result and 1988 partial-synchrony work.

Neha Narkhede

Neha Narkhede (born 1985, Pune) is the Indian-American engineer who co-created Apache Kafka at LinkedIn and co-founded Confluent (acquired by IBM in 2026), its former CTO, now CEO of fraud-detection firm Oscilar and a Forbes-listed investor.

Nick Feamster

Nick Feamster, also known as Nicholas Feamster, is an American computer scientist and Neubauer Professor at the University of Chicago who studies computer networking and Internet security.

Nick McKeown

Nick McKeown is a Stanford computer networks researcher, co-inventor of software-defined networking and creator of the iSLIP scheduling algorithm, who won the 2025 Marconi Prize.

Nick Schrock

Nick Schrock is an American software engineer, co-creator of GraphQL at Facebook, and founder and CTO of Dagster Labs, whose open-source Python data orchestration platform Dagster raised $49M.

Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus "Bucky" Wirth (1934–2024) was a Swiss computer scientist who designed Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon, won the 1984 Turing Award, and taught at ETH Zurich from 1968 to 1999.

Nir Shavit

Nir Shavit is an Israeli computer scientist, professor at MIT and Tel Aviv University, known for software transactional memory and winning the 2004 Gödel Prize.

Nithya Ramanathan

Nithya Ramanathan is a computer scientist who co-founded Nexleaf Analytics in 2009, a nonprofit whose ColdTrace temperature sensors protect vaccine supplies in India, Kenya, and other countries.

Nobuo Yoneda

Nobuo Yoneda (米田信夫) was a Japanese mathematician and computer scientist, professor at the University of Tokyo, whose Yoneda lemma is a central result of category theory.

Ole-Johan Dahl

Ole-Johan Dahl was a Norwegian computer scientist who, with Kristen Nygaard, created the Simula languages at the Norwegian Computing Center, introduced object-oriented programming, and won the 2001 Turing Award.