Sun has announced that Radia Perlman has been named a Sun Fellow in recognition of her considerable technical expertise and profound impact on the fields of network security and routing.

Perlman, Sun Fellow, Network Protocols and Security Project of Sun Laboratories, is best known for her invention of the Spanning Tree Algorithm, a key technology used in local-area networks, and for innovations that have made link state routing protocols robust, efficient, and scalable. Perlman has more than 80 patents issued with more pending, and her two books, Interconnections and Network Security, are widely used by engineers and as textbooks in universities. Her many awards include the USENIX 2006 lifetime achievement award, SVIPLA 2004 Inventor of the Year award, and an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden (KTH). She was named by both Network World and Data Communications Magazineas one of the most influential people in networking. She has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.

Highly prestigious, the title of Sun Fellow is the most senior rank that can be attained within Sun’s engineering organization. Sun Fellows help guide Sun’s technical direction, identify new opportunities and advise the management team on technical issues. Radia’s appointment adds her to the elite group of Fellows at Sun—Nick Aneshansley, Richard Dee, Whitfield Diffie, James Gosling, Jim Hughes, Tim Marsland, Jim Mitchell, Mike Splain, Bob Sproull, Guy Steele, Ivan Sutherland and Marc Tremblay.