2017-May-25

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A Standard of Excellence

Following your passion can pay off in spades. Just ask Cisco Fellow Alissa Cooper, who recently became the first female chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)—the body that oversees the technical standards at the core of the Internet.

Chairing the IETF is no small feat; the organization plays a hugely important role in the growth and expansion of the Internet and, by extension, in Cisco's continued success. In its 31-year history, the IETF has birthed an alphabet soup of standards that make the Internet what it is today—among them IP, TCP, HTTP, SMTP, SIP, DNS and DHCP. Alissa is only the ninth person to chair the organization since its inception.

The route Alissa took to these rarified heights was an unusual one. After catching the programming bug in high school, she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science at Stanford. But writing code in a cookie-cutter tech job was never her calling. She wanted to work in tech and have an impact on people.

She was able to fulfill both those passions in her first job, with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a think tank in Washington, D.C., that works to keep the Internet open, innovative and free. Alissa's role at CDT involved helping technical people and lawyers understand how the Internet works in order to inform the policy positions of the organization.

She also had a realization: "We felt that values like privacy and free speech were being designed into the fabric of the Internet, including in technical standards” she says. "It's how I got into doing standards work in the IETF."

And so began the years of working her way around the IETF, maintaining her responsibilities within the organization even while earning her Ph.D. at the Oxford Internet Institute. Before becoming chair, she served three years as a co-director for the set of working groups that produce applications and real-time communications protocols. Previously, she served three years on the Internet Architecture Board and she was chair of the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) Stewardship Coordination Group.

"My path to this has been unconventional," says Alissa, a lifelong athlete who grew up in the suburbs of Maryland.

Alissa joined Cisco as a Distinguished Engineer in 2013, working under Jonathan Rosenberg, who is vice president and chief technology officer for the company's Collaboration Technology Group. She has focused on privacy, policy and regulatory issues—for example, advising engineering teams on data privacy-related issues in the cloud.

When she joined the company, Cisco Spark was in its early development stages, prompting big decisions around privacy as the team thought through the cloud architecture. They had to decide what data they would collect, how they would secure it, who would have access to it and how long they would retain it—all of which was right in Alissa's wheelhouse.

In 2016, Alissa moved from California back to Washington to be closer to her family. Her husband works in D.C. for Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser. In March, Alissa became a Cisco Fellow—the company's highest technical echelon. Because her new IETF role is a full-time position, she needed—and got—Cisco's full support to pursue it. She takes the helm at the IETF at a dynamic time, with technology trends such as IoT, SDN and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) going into overdrive and shaping the industry.

The mentor who urged Alissa to follow her passion from an early age was none other than her father, whom she describes as a "brilliant and driven" man who went to college when he was 16. While there, he rose to the challenge of his father's death to run the household and the family laundromat business, before going on to earn his Ph.D. from Yale.

Other passions in Alissa's life? Her love of athletics is one. She was a serious gymnast from the age of four all the way through college, where she excelled in the vault and uneven bars. She captained the Stanford women's gymnastics team, which qualified to the national championships several times and broke records under her leadership. More recently, she turned that drive to Olympic-distance triathlons, and still trains with the triathlon club despite the demands of motherhood.

Which brings us to her other passion—family. She met her husband, a fellow gymnast, at Stanford. Together, they have a two-year-old daughter.

"And I'm expecting a second," she says.

A Standard of Excellence

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