Frank Moss (technologist)

Frank Moss is a researcher, technology and biotechnology entrepreneur, academician and author. Moss was the director of the MIT Media Lab from 2006 to 2011. He remains a professor of the practice and the principal investigator for the New Media Medicine research group, which he founded.

He is the author of The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives, published in 2011.

From 2007 to 2011, Moss was a trustee of Princeton University, where he served as Chairman of the Alumni Affairs Committee; currently, he is a member of the Advisory Council for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also a member of the advisory council of the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation.

Moss was born Franklin Moss on April 20, 1949 in Baltimore, Maryland, where he attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. His father was Sam Moss, a local radio personality who had a weekly radio show, The Sam Moss Show, in Baltimore for 30 years. He is the middle child of older brother Billy, a retired successful restaurateur; and younger sister Ivy.

As a teenager, Moss became enthralled with America’s fledgling space program, which informed his choice of higher education and career. He received a BS in aerospace and mechanical sciences from Princeton University, and both his MS and PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. In the course of his academic work at MIT, he became exposed to high-performance computing and networking technologies that would later become part of the Internet. His interest in the broad commercial potential of these technologies led him to pursue his professional career in the computer and software industries.

He began his career at IBM's scientific center in Haifa, Israel, where he also taught at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He later held various research and management positions at IBM's Yorktown Heights (NY) Research Center, working on advanced development projects in the areas of networking and distributed computing; and executive management positions at Apollo Computer Inc., and Lotus Development Corporation.

During his career in the computer and software industries, Moss served as CEO and chairman of Tivoli Systems Inc., a pioneer in the distributed systems management field, which he took public in 1995 and subsequently merged with IBM in 1996. Tivoli was a venture-backed startup that successfully competed with larger companies to redefine and standardize the technology behind network and systems management. The acquisition by IBM became more of a “reverse merger,” in that Tivoli became the network and systems management division of IBM and one of its largest software businesses, growing to several billion dollars. Moss became the general manager of the Tivoli business at IBM; he retired from Tivoli as chairman in 1998.

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