Nicholas William McKeown FREng (born April 7, 1963) is a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at Stanford University and a visiting professor at Oxford University. He has also founded technology companies in Silicon Valley.

McKeown received his bachelor's degree from the University of Leeds in 1986. From 1986 through 1989, he worked for Hewlett-Packard Labs in their network and communications research group in Bristol, England. He moved to the United States in 1989 and earned a master's degree in 1992 and a PhD in 1995 from the University of California at Berkeley. During spring 1995, he worked briefly for Cisco Systems, where he helped design their GSR 12000 router. His PhD thesis was titled "Scheduling Cells in an Input-Queued Cell Switch," with advisor Professor Jean Walrand. He joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1995 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

In 1997, McKeown co-founded Abrizio Inc. with Anders Swahn, where he served as chief technology officer. Abrizio was acquired by PMC-Sierra in 1999 for stock shares valued at $400 million. He was promoted to associate professor in 2002. In 2003, he co-founded Nemo Systems with Sundar Iyer and served as CEO. Cisco Systems acquired Nemo Systems in 2005. He became faculty director of the Clean Slate Program in 2006 and was promoted to full professor at Stanford in 2010. In 2007, Casado, McKeown, and Shenker co-founded Nicira Networks, a company based in Palo Alto, California, that focused on network virtualization. VMWare acquired Nicira Networks for $1.26 billion in July 2012.

Research

McKeown is involved in the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, which he helped begin with Scott Shenker and Martin Casado. SDN and OpenFlow originated from Casado’s PhD research at Stanford University, where McKeown was his teacher. OpenFlow is a new method for controlling network switches, routers, WiFi access points, cellular base stations, and WDM/TDM equipment using software commands. OpenFlow changed the traditional approach to designing switches and routers, which had been dominated by companies that made all parts of these devices themselves. In 2011, McKeown and Shenker co-founded the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) to move control of OpenFlow to a new not-for-profit organization.

McKeown supported the idea that network switches should be programmable, meaning they can be controlled and updated through software rather than being fixed in their functions. A partnership between TI and Stanford led to the development of PISA (protocol independent switch architecture), originally named RMT. The P4 language was created to describe how data packets are handled in programmable switches. P4 is an open-source language managed by P4.org, a not-for-profit organization founded by McKeown, Jennifer Rexford, and Amin Vahdat. McKeown co-founded Barefoot Networks to design and sell PISA switches, showing that programmable switches can be made with the same efficiency, speed, and cost as traditional switches. In June 2019, Intel Corporation announced its plan to acquire Barefoot Networks to strengthen its leadership in networking and infrastructure for data centers. Nick joined Intel and became the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Network and Edge Group (NEX) when it was established in 2021.

Awards and distinctions

In 2000, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize for the best paper in communications theory was awarded to a paper titled "Achieving 100% Throughput in an Input-Queued Switch." The paper was co-authored by McKeown, Adisak Mekkittikul, Venkat Anantharam, and Jean Walrand. It explained how to solve a problem called head-of-line blocking by using a method called virtual output queues.

McKeown received an honorary doctorate from ETH Zurich. He is recognized as a Distinguished Alumnus of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012, he was honored with the ACM Sigcomm "Lifetime Achievement" Award for his work in designing, analyzing, and building high-performance routers, which had a major influence on the global Internet. McKeown is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), and the National Academy of Inventors. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), the IEEE, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2005, he was given the Lovelace Medal by the British Computer Society and delivered a lecture titled "Internet Routers (Past, Present, and Future)." The award description called him "the world's leading expert on router design." In 2009, he received the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award. In 2015, he shared the NEC C&C Award with Martin Casado and Scott Shenker for their research on SDN. In 2021, McKeown was awarded the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal for outstanding contributions to communications and networking sciences and engineering. He also received the 2025 Marconi Prize. At Stanford, he has held positions such as STMicroelectronics Faculty Scholar, Robert Noyce Faculty Fellow, and Fellow of the Powell Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He also received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.

Vint Cerf and McKeown created two videos to introduce Cerf at conferences (Video 1 and Video 2). McKeown spoke at the TED 2006 Conference in Monterey, where he performed a juggling act while reciting the digits of Pi. He was also an international swimmer and competed for Great Britain in the 1985 World Student Games in Kobe, where he swam the 100m breaststroke.

Opposition to the death penalty

McKeown is part of the effort to end the death penalty. He led unsuccessful ballot initiatives in California in 2012 and 2016 to stop capital punishment. These efforts led to a moratorium on the death penalty, which Governor Gavin Newsom announced on March 13, 2019. In 2001, McKeown helped fund the Death Penalty Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law in Berkeley, California. In 2009, he received the Abolition Award from Death Penalty Focus. He gave a TedX talk about ending the death penalty in 2016.