Vinton G. Cerf has served as the Vice President and the Chief Internet Evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he contributes to global policy development and continued standardisation and spread of the Internet. Cerf is the former Senior Vice President of technology strategy for MCI. Previously, Cerf served as MCI’s Senior Vice President of architecture and technology. As the Vice President of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982–1986, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. During his tenure from 1976–1982 with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, Cerf played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related packet data transport and security technologies.

Widely known as one of the ‘Fathers of the Internet,’ Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet. Kahn and Cerf were named the recipients of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Alan M. Turing award in 2004 for their work on the Internet protocols. In November 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Cerf and Kahn the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their work. In April 2008, Cerf and Kahn received the prestigious Japan Prize and in 2013 Cerf, Kahn, and three others received the Queen Elizabeth Prize in Engineering. Cerf was made an officer of the French Legion d’Honneur in December 2014 and a Foreign Member of the British Royal Society in July 2016. In 2018 together with Kahn, he received the Franklin Medal. Cerf was appointed by President Obama to serve a 6-year term on the National Science Board beginning in May 2012. He served as the President of ACM from 2012–2014. He served as Chair of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers from 2000–2007. Cerf also served as the Founding President of the Internet Society from 1992–1995 and in 1999 served a term as the Chair of the board. Cerf also holds an appointment as Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he is working on the design and implementation of an interplanetary Internet. Cerf holds a B.S. in mathematics from Stanford University and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles.