Professor of Innovation and inventor of today's local-area networking standard, Ethernet, Dr. Bob Metcalfe is the Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise in The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering.

Metcalfe has been a partner of Polaris Venture Partners since 2001 and continues as Venture Partner on the boards of five Polaris-backed enertech startups. During the 1990s, he was publisher of InfoWorld and wrote an Internet column with half a million weekly readers. During the 1980s, he founded, took public and grew the billion-dollar computer networking company, 3Com Corp., which merged with Hewlett-Packard in 2010. In the 1970s, Metcalfe was an Internet pioneer at MIT, Harvard and the Computer Science Laboratory of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he invented Ethernet.

Metcalfe has received numerous awards and recognitions including the ACM Grace Hopper Award in 1980, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal in 1988, the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1996, the National Medal of Technology in 2005, induction into to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007 and the Fellow Award from the Computer History Museum in 2008. In 2011 he received Japan's Computers and Communications Prize and was inducted into the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame.

In November 2010 Metcalfe was recruited to lead innovation initiatives at The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering. He began his appointment in January 2011.

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