Career
In 2001 he co-founded the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab and was the Assistant Managing Director until the lab was disbanded in 2014. Starting in 1976 he has been on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department faculty, at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and at the DEC Systems Research Center. His areas of research include computer security, distributed systems and operating systems
At Massachusetts Institute of Technology he was involved in the Multics project
Some other systems he has built are Grapevine (distributed system), the filesystem of Cedar, Topaz (distributed Operating system), Autonet (Local Area Network ) and Pachyderm (web based email). In 2004 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
In 2006 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGSAC presented him with the Outstanding Innovations Award "for technical contributions to the field of computer and communication security that have had lasting impact in furthering or understanding the theory and/or development of commercial systems"
In 2008 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGOPS chose the paper Grapevine: An Exercise in Distributed Computing, which he coauthored, for a Hall of Fame Award "that recognizes the most influential operating systems papers in the peer-reviewed literature at least ten year old."
Schroeder was born in 1945 in Richland, Washington. He did his undergraduate work at Washington State University and went to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, obtaining his Doctor of Philosophy in 1972.
He is a leading expert on the American landscape painter Gilbert Munger, for whom he authors a web-based catalogue raisonné and archive of period documents.
With J. Gray Sweeney of Arizona State University he wrote the book Gilbert Munger: Quest for Distinction (Afton Historical Society Press, 2003).
