Burrows did his undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering with Computer Science at University College London and then completed his Doctor of Philosophy in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he was a member of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Born in Britain, he now lives in the United States, although remaining a British citizen. Upon leaving Cambridge, he worked at the Systems Research Center (Strategic Research Centre) at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where, with Louis Monier, he was one of the two main creators of AltaVista. Following Compaq"s acquisition of DEC, Burrows worked briefly for Microsoft.
Shortly thereafter he went to Google.
After his early work at the University of Cambridge, where he researched micro-kernels and basic matters of security, he went on to enlarge upon that work as systems were deployed at large scale on the Internet. During his employment at Google, Burrows has studied concurrency and synchronisation, and for programming in the large – especially with respect to the C++ language.
Burrows was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2013. His nomination read: "Doctor Michael Burrows is distinguished for his pioneering work on web search and indexing. He was one of the designers of the early search engine Altavista. He was also one of the pioneers of the application of formal logic to the verification of security protocols. He has made seminal contributions to many other areas of computer science and engineering ranging from compression through synchronization to performance measurement. He is one of the engineers who led the design of Google"s distributed computing infrastructure. ".
Royal Society.
