James Mickens is an associate professor of computer science at Harvard University. 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).
