Eli Gafni, UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), USA

Eli Gafni received his Bs.C from Technion, Msc and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1979 and 1982, from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and M.I.T, respectively. In 1982 he joined the UCLA computer science faculty. Eli Gafni was the recipient of a 1983 IBM Faculty Development Award, and a 1984 NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. His research interests include distributed algorithms, mathematical programming with application to distributed routing and control of data networks, and computer science theory.
Eli Gafni was involved with the Internet in the early days when it consisted of only few nodes. Unlike his contemporaries in MIT, of which quite a few went on to become few hundred times Internet Millionaires, he joined UCLA computer-science department and abstracted the Internet to the point that he became even too theoretical for that discipline. Nevertheless, with tenure, he is still a Professor at UCLA, holding forth that intellectual fun or the ability to roam perhaps aimlessly through intellectually challenging roads, is the reason to be in University rather than Industry. He does not envy the Millionaires, and he is only partially responsible for the sorry financial-state of the UC system.