Michael Burrows

This article is about the computer scientist. For the Church of Ireland (Anglican) bishop, see Michael Burrows (bishop).

Michael Burrows
Born	1963 (age 60–61)
Residence	United States of America
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	Google University of Cambridge Digital Equipment Corporation AltaVista Microsoft
Alma mater	University College London (undergraduate) Churchill College, Cambridge (postgraduate)
Thesis	Efficient Data Sharing (1988)
Doctoral advisor	David Wheeler
Known for	Burrows–Wheeler transform
Influences	Roger Needham
Notable awards	Fellow of the Royal Society (2013)
Website royalsociety.org/people/michael-burrows research.google.com/pubs/author24014.html

Michael Burrows, FRS (born 1963) is a British computer scientist and the creator of the Burrows–Wheeler transform currently working for Google. Born in Britain, he now lives in the United States, although remaining a British citizen.

Education

Burrows did his undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering with Computer Science at University College London and then completed his PhD in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he was a member of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Career

Upon leaving Cambridge, he worked at the Systems Research Center (SRC) at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where, with Louis Monier, he was one of the two main creators of AltaVista.

Following Compaq's acquisition of DEC, Burrows worked briefly for Microsoft. Shortly thereafter he went to Google.

After his early work at the University of Cambridge, where he researched micro-kernels and basic matters of security, he went on to enlarge upon that work as systems were deployed at large scale on the Internet.

During his employment at Google, Burrows has studied concurrency and synchronisation, and for programming in the large – especially with respect to the C++ language.

Awards

Burrows was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2013. His nomination read:

"Dr Michael Burrows is distinguished for his pioneering work on web search and indexing. He was one of the designers of the early search engine Altavista. He was also one of the pioneers of the application of formal logic to the verification of security protocols. He has made seminal contributions to many other areas of computer science and engineering ranging from compression through synchronization to performance measurement. He is one of the engineers who led the design of Google's distributed computing infrastructure. "