Jim Waldo is the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he also serves as Chief Technology Officer for the school and Distinguished Engineer for Harvard University Information Technology. He is additionally a Professor of technology policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, associated with the Belfer Center, Shorenstein Center, and Carr Center. Waldo received his Bachelor of Science in Philosophy from the University of Utah in 1973, Master of Arts degrees in Linguistics in 1975 and Philosophy in 1976 from the University of Utah, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1980.

Throughout his career, Waldo has held key roles in industry and academia. Early positions included work at Pixel Computer, Hampshire College, and VI Corp in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From 1985 to 1992, he worked at Apollo Computer and Hewlett-Packard, leading the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, which was instrumental in its adoption into the initial Object Management Group CORBA specification. Joining Sun Microsystems Laboratories in 1992 as a Distinguished Engineer until 2010, he served as lead architect for the Jini distributed computing technology, contributed to early Java development, and led the Darkstar project for multi-threaded and distributed infrastructure supporting online games and virtual worlds. Following a year at VMware, he joined Harvard in 2011. Waldo's research specializations encompass distributed systems, privacy, technology policy concerning cybersecurity and privacy, medical sensing, object-oriented programming and systems, distributed computing, user environments, user interfaces, class libraries, and text and internationalization. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM. Notable publications include Java: The Good Parts (O'Reilly Media, 2010), The Jini Specification (Addison-Wesley, 1999, co-authored with Ken Arnold, Bryan O'Sullivan, Robert Scheifler, and Ann Wollrath), The Evolution of C++: Language Design in the Marketplace of Ideas (MIT Press, 1993, editor), Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age (National Academies Press, 2007, co-authored), A Note on Distributed Computing (1994), and On System Design (2006). His contributions have significantly influenced distributed object technologies and standards such as CORBA and Jini.

Professional Email: waldo@eecs.harvard.edu