Professor, Computer Science, Harvard University
James W. Mickens is an American computer scientist and the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His research focuses on distributed systems, such as large-scale services and ways to make them more secure.
Mickens worked as a member of the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research from 2009 through 2015.He spent one semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) through the MLK Visiting Professors program becoming a professor at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2015, where he was awarded tenure in 2019.
In 2016, he was one of the researchers working on Polaris, a new system designed at MIT to decrease the speed for loading webpages.
Mickens earned a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001, as well as a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 2008.