Alan Eustace

Alan Eustace
Alan Eustace in 2008.
Born	Robert Alan Eustace 1956/1957 (age 59–60)
Alma mater	University of Central Florida
Occupation	Computer scientist
Known for	World record for the highest-altitude free-fall jump
Board member of	Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology

Robert Alan Eustace is an American computer scientist who served as Senior Vice President of Knowledge at Google. Since October 24, 2014, he holds the world record for the highest-altitude free-fall jump.

The son of a Martin Marietta engineer, Eustace grew up in Pine Hills, Florida, then a working-class suburb of Orlando, where small ranch houses had been built for employees of the Martin Marietta Corporation. After graduating from Maynard Evans High School in 1974, he received a debate scholarship from Valencia College and attended it for a year before transferring to Florida Technological University — now known as the University of Central Florida — to major in mechanical engineering.

As a university student, Eustace worked part-time selling popcorn and ice cream in Fantasyland and working on the monorail at Walt Disney World. However, after taking a class on computer science, he decided to switch majors and ended up completing three academic degrees in the field, including a doctorate in 1984.

After graduation, Eustace worked briefly for Silicon Solutions, a startup in Silicon Valley, before joining Digital, Compaq and then HP's Western Research Laboratory, where he worked 15 years on pocket computing, chip multi-processors, power and energy management, internet performance, and frequency and voltage scaling. In the mid-1990s, he worked with Amitabh Srivastava on ATOM, a binary-code instrumentation system that forms the basis for a wide variety of program analysis and computer architecture analysis tools. These tools had a profound influence on the EV5, EV6 and EV7 chip designs.