Research at Cisco

Joel Bion

S.V.P. Research and Advanced Development

Joel Bion, an employee with Cisco Systems since 1989, was the first manager of technical support and set many elements of Cisco's customer-first culture that continue today. Joel's roles grew in scope and responsibility as Senior Vice President of Cisco's IOS software division (NSSTG). Joel currently leads Cisco's Research and Advanced Development (R&AD) organization. In this role, he works to identify new technologies and where appropriate promote adoption across Cisco's Engineering divisions. Programs are focused on architecture, open source governance and strategy, and baseline product capabilities. R&AD's University Relations and Research team is responsible for fostering collaborative relationships between university research organizations and Cisco.

Bion holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, and on his free time, loves to read, walk in the Bay Area foothills and cook barbeque.

Steven Fraser

Director, Cisco Research Center

Steven Fraser joined the Cisco Research Center in 2007 with responsibilities for developing and managing university research relations. Prior to joining Cisco, Steve held a variety of technical management roles at Qualcomm (San Diego), Nortel (Santa Clara), the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at CMU (Pittsburgh), and at BNR (Ottawa). Steve has held a variety of leadership positions for the ACM's OOPSLA, the IEEE's ICSE and the XP200N series of software conferences. Steve holds a doctorate (Electrical Engineering) from McGill University in Montréal – and is a member of the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE. For a partial list of his papers, please see the list here.

Fred Baker

Cisco Fellow

Fred is a long time Cisco Fellow with many major contributions to the IETF and networking community writing or contributing to over 40 IETF protocols as well as holding many US patents. He has been active in the networking and communications industry since the late seventies, working successively for CDC, Vitalink, ACC, and Cisco Systems. At Cisco, Fred worked at the forefront of congestion management. More recently he focuses on the migration to IPv6. He is a past IETF Chair. He is currently co-chair of the IETF IPv6 Operations Working Group , a representative from Cisco to BITAG , and a representative to the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel and the Smart Grid Architecture Committee from the IETF. Fred is married and has four children.

Mod Marathe

Cisco Distinguished Engineer

Mod has been a Cisco Distinguished Engineer since December 2000. Mod joined Cisco in 1996 with the Stratacom acquisition. He has used quantitative metrics and analysis to translate the fuzzy "five nines" availability requirement into specific engineering tasks and product features. His personal passion is to make Cisco's data networks more reliable than traditional telephone networks.

His areas of expertise include: High Availability, Software quality, Product security, secure product development, and Next generation TelePresence products. Mod has a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Mei Wang

Head, Asia Pacific Research

Mei Wang is the Head of Asia Pacific Research at Cisco. Mei has been with Cisco for over 9 years, her research and advanced development have been deployed in multiple Cisco products, including the world's largest router CRS-1, Cisco's best selling switch Catalyst 6000, and VoIP gateway. Mei contributes regularly to standard bodies and international conferences, with research interests in network architecture and algorithms. Her decade of industry experience spans from the areas of IPv6, network scalability, routing and addressing, embedded system design, to multimedia.

Mei received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Electrical Engineering and B.S. from Peking University in Physics. She is co-author of the biography book "Women Executives in Silicon Valley" published in 2005 and the President of NACSA, a high-tech professional organization with over 4000 members.