Lee W. McKnight

Lee W.McKnight is an Associate Professor in the iSchool (The School of Information Studies), Syracuse University, an Affiliate of Syracuse University’s Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism (INSTC), and lectures annually at MIT since 1998. Lee was Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation Partnerships for Innovation Wireless Grids Innovation Testbed (WiGiT) project 2009-2014, which was recipient of the 2011 TACNY Award for Technology Project of Year. Lee is inventor of edgeware, a new class of software for creating secure ad hoc overlay cloud to edge applications. Lee’s research focuses on cloud management of dynamic edge services, virtual markets and wireless grids, the global information economy, national and international technology policy, and Internet governance. He was an Associate Professor of International Information and Communication and Director of the Edward R. Murrow Center at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University; Principal Research Associate, Lecturer, and Visiting Scholar at MIT; and Founder of the Internet Telephony Consortium, also at MIT. Lee served on the Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council of TM Forum; and as a member of IEEE P2030.4 smart grid interoperability task force. Lee is Founder and was a Member of the Board of Directors of Wireless Grids Corporation, 2004-2014. Lee was a Founding Member of the Board of Directors of Summerhill Biomass Systems 2007-2013.

McKnight teaches graduate and undergraduate courses such as Cloud Architecture, Cloud Management, Information Security Policy (joint with Syracuse Law School/INSCT), Information Policy, and Telecommunications Regulation at Syracuse University, and lectures annually in the MIT Professional Education short course, ‘Technology, Organizations, and Innovation: Putting Ideas to Work.’ His research interests span policy, economic, business and technical aspects of the global information economy. In addition to many peer reviewed journal articles in technical and policy journals, his academic work includes a number of books. Professor McKnight’s next 4 books on his ground-breaking virtual markets and wireless grids research will be published in 2016-2017 by Imperial College Press/World Scientific Press, Singapore and London. The first book in the World Scientific Press series, ‘Cloud to Edgeware: Wireless Grid Applications, Architecture and Security for the “Internet of Things”‘ is with Tyson T Brooks. Lee’s co-authored (with Peter Cukor) book ‘Knowledge Networks, the Internet, and Development’ was published by MIT Center for E-Business/Nabu Press, 2014 and 2011. McKnight’s co-authored and co-edited books published by MIT Press include ‘Creative Destruction: Business Survival Strategies in the Global Internet Economy’(2001,2002, Japanese translation by Toyo Kezai 2003; Chinese translation by Economic Sciences Press 2007), ‘Internet Telephony’(2001), the award-winning ‘The Gordian Knot:Political Gridlock on the Information Highway’(1997,1999) and Internet Economics (MIT Press, 1997, 1998), a path breaking work that is the first to develop metrics for economic analysis of Internet transactions.

McKnight received a Ph.D. in 1989 from MIT; an M.A. from the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University in 1981; and a B.A. magna cum laude from Tufts University in 1978.