Ben is a systems researcher focusing on SDN. He is currently working on integrating control planes and data planes to improve scalability and developer productivity, as well as on improvement to software data plane performance. Ben was one of the first employees at Nicira Networks in 2007. There, he founded and led development of the Open vSwitch and OVN projects, continuing at VMware after it acquired Nicira in 2012. He also contributed to the OpenFlow and P4 specifications. In January 2020, Ben joined the VMware Research Group. Ben is a Senior Member of ACM and a Fellow of the Open Networking Foundation. Ben has been a free and open source software developer since 1995, as a contributor to Debian and GNU and other projects. He obtained his PhD from Stanford in 2007.