Michael Schroeder is a computer scientist perhaps best known as the co-inventor of the Needham-Schroeder protocol. He is the assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, where he has been since its inception in 2001 when he moved from DEC SRC. His areas of research include computer security, distributed systems and operating systems. When he was a professor at MIT he was involved in the Multics project. Some other systems he has built are Grapevine (distributed system), the filesystem of Cedar, Topaz (distributed OS), Autonet (LAN) and Pachyderm (web based email). In 2004 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2006 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 2007 NIST/NSA gave him the National Computer Systems Security Award.