James Mickens is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard's Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). He is a Director of the Berkman Klein Center and was a Principal Investigator at the Applied Social Media Lab, where he led the Transparency Hub, Permissions Explorer, Encrypted Spaces, Advanced Digital Identity (or Keyring) and Fediverse projects. His current research focuses on the performance, security, and robustness of large-scale distributed web services. His research focuses on the performance, security, and robustness of large-scale distributed web services.
For example, his Riverbed project explores how to use trusted hardware and new OS interfaces to allow users to constrain how datacenters manipulate sensitive data.
Mickens received a B.S. degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan. Before coming to Harvard, he spent six years as a researcher at Microsoft, and a semester as a visiting professor at MIT.
He is also the creator of Mickens-do, a martial art so deadly that he refuses to teach it to anyone (including himself).
