Brighten Godfrey
Lead PI, Agora Project; Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Brighten Godfrey is a Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He co-founded and served as CTO of network verification pioneer Veriflow through its 2019 acquisition by VMware, and served as a Technical Director at VMware (now Broadcom) through 2025. He received his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2009, and his B.S. at Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. His research interests lie in the design of networked systems and algorithms. He has served as co-chair of ACM SIGCOMM 2022, SOSR 2016 and ACM HotNets 2014 and 2025, and currently serves on the ACM SIGCOMM Steering Committee. He is a winner of the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the UIUC Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research.