F. Thomson Leighton


Frank Thomson "Tom" Leighton is the CEO of Akamai Technologies, the company he co-founded with Daniel Lewin in 1998. Akamai has become the top content delivery provider in the 21st century with the arrival of dedicated techs. As one of the world's preeminent authorities on algorithms for network applications and cybersecurity, Dr. Leighton discovered a solution to freeing up web congestion using applied mathematics and distributed computing.
He is on leave as a professor of Applied Mathematics and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1978, and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT in 1981. His brother David T. Leighton is a full professor at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in transport phenomena. Their father was a U.S. Navy colleague and friend of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, a founder of the Research Science Institute.
Dr. Leighton has served on numerous government, industry and academic advisory panels, including the Presidential Informational Technology Advisory Committee and chaired its subcommittee on cybersecurity. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Society for Science & the Public and of the Center for Excellence in Education, and he has participated in the Distinguished Lecture Series at CEE's flagship program for high school students, the Research Science Institute.

Awards and honors

In 2018, Leighton won the Marconi Prize from the Marconi Society for "his fundamental contributions to the technology and establishment of content delivery networks". In 2017, Leighton and Lewin were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, for Content Delivery Network methods. He was the first winner of the Machtey Award in 1981 and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2008, he was appointed as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He received the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award in 2001. He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "his leadership in the establishment of content delivery networks, and his contributions to algorithm design".

Books