Frank Thomson "Tom" Leighton is the CEO of Akamai Technologies, the company he co-founded with Daniel Lewin in 1998. As one of the world's preeminent authorities on algorithms for network applications and cybersecurity, Dr. Leighton discovered a solution to freeing up web congestion using applied mathematics and distributed computing.
He is on leave as a professor of Applied Mathematics and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1978, and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT in 1981. His brother David T. Leighton is a full professor at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in transport phenomena. Their father was a U.S. Navy colleague and friend of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the father of naval nuclear propulsion and a founder of the Research Science Institute.
Dr. Leighton has served on numerous government, industry and academic advisory panels, including the Presidential Informational Technology Advisory Committee and chaired its subcommittee on cybersecurity.