With great pleasure, the Department welcomes its newest faculty member, Professor Bruce Maggs. Maggs joins the Duke community after fifteen years of research and teaching in parallel and distributed systems at Carnegie Mellon University.

After receiving his SB, SM, and PhD degrees from MIT and working as a research scientist at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, Maggs joined Carnegie Mellon. In 1998, while on sabbatical at MIT, he helped launch a start-up company called Akamai Technologies. Today, Akamai is an international content delivery network that handles hundreds of billions of Web interactions every day for web sites like Apple iTunes and Microsoft Windows Update. Working at Akamai as VP of Research and Development sparked Maggs’ interest in massive data sets, a major focus of his research today. His recent projects include an analysis of reducing energy costs of large distributed systems, an investigation of improving database bottlenecks resulting from increased dynamic website content, and a study of denial of capability attacks based on previous work done by Professor Xiaowei Yang. “I have tremendous respect for the Duke faculty,” says Maggs, who met many of his new colleagues as a visiting professor at Duke during the 2007-2008 school year. “And the students are fantastic and bright.”

Maggs is no stranger to Duke: His grandfather was a law professor at the University, which proudly supports an endowed chair in his name. When he’s not in his office, you can catch Maggs on the hockey rink or softball field, or out zipping around Chapel Hill on his trusty electric scooter.