I grew up in Dublin, Ireland and in 1988 headed off to University College Dublin to do a joint honours degree in pure mathematics and theoretical physics, taking computer science as an option in my first year. After two years of failing to get to grips with certain aspects of complex analysis and quantum mechanics, I bailed into the computer science degree, which was a lot more fun. In 1992 I received my B.Sc. and decided to do a Ph.D. in natural language processing (compositional semantics) after spending the summer in Paris with the Erasmus programme.

For reasons to complicated to get into, I missed Paris by about five hundred miles(*) and ended up working as a researcher for Ericsson in Herzogenrath, near Aachen, Germany. This was a lot of fun because they had a lot of kit and a lot of money. I worked mainly on "multimedia" things such as low-latency network audio, video-conferencing and multimedia e-mail; in 1993 I finished an M.Sc. on this last topic. Following this I was supposed to start a Ph.D. in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in January 1994, but funding fell through. Instead I ended up working on the operating system for Ericsson's B-ISDN switch for about six months, and then headed off to Australia where I imposed on friends and drank a lot of ice-filtered lager.

I finally arrived in Cambridge in October 1994. At first I worked with the experimental Wanda micro-kernel, but soon moved on to the newer Nemesis system which had been developed by Timothy Roscoe (now at Intel Research, Berkeley), David Evers and Paul Barham (now at Microsoft Research, Cambridge) as part of the ESPRIT Pegasus project. I got involved in the re-design and implementation of Nemesis for the follow up project (Pegasus II). Most of my work was on the virtual memory system (I submitted my Ph.D., "Providing Quality of Service in Memory Management" in 1998), but I also contributed to most other interesting parts of the system. Current information about Nemesis can be found here.

In 1998 I became a Lecturer in the Systems Research Group, and a Fellow of Wolfson College. In July 2001 I headed off to San Francisco for a year's sabbatical working at Sprint ATL in Burlingame, CA. This was a lot of fun, and I still miss the sushi and skiing. In July 2002 I returned to Cambridge, and have been here ever since. Time to plan another sabbatical I think :-)

* I received the following information from a somewhat pedantic current research student:

    "... you say that you missed Paris by 500 miles and ended up in Aachen.
    The crow would fly between the two in about 215 miles; 500 miles would
    get you all the way back to Dublin or to Hamburg, Munich, Milan,
    Genoa, Barcelona or the western parts of the Czech Republic and
    Austria, according to http://www.indo.com/cgi-bin/dist ."