W.M. Coughran, Jr.

Who is W.M. Coughran, Jr.?

Bill Coughran leads the broad systems infrastructure

group underlying Google's products and services, including cluster

management, storage, search systems, and a number of product

engineering efforts. He joined Google engineering in early 2003.

Throughout his extensive career in computing, Bill has been involved

with networking, secure, and distributed systems as well as

computational science and engineering. Before joining Google, Bill

co-founded and served as CEO and in other executive roles at

Entrisphere in Silicon Valley. Earlier, he was head of Bell Labs'

Computing Sciences Research Center, where C, C++, Unix, Plan 9, and

Inferno were created. He has also worked in computational science and

distributed systems.

Bill currently serves on the boards of directors for nSolutions Inc and

Clearwell Systems Inc. In addition, he is an author of more than 50

publications and has served on several scientific boards/committees and

technical advisory bodies. He has also held adjunct and visiting

positions at Stanford, the ETH, and Duke.

Bill holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University as well as degrees in mathematics from Caltech.