Fred B. Schneider is the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He joined Cornell’s faculty in Fall 1978 and served as department chair from 2014-2018.

Schneider’s research has focused on various aspects of trustworthy systems — systems that will perform as expected, despite failures and attacks. His early work concerned formal methods to aid in the design and implementation of concurrent and distributed systems that satisfy their specifications. He is author of two texts on that subject: On Concurrent Programming (co-authored with D. Gries) and A Logical Approach to Discrete Mathematics. He also is co-author (with R. van Renesse) of chain replication, which is widely used to implement replicated storage in today’s cloud systems.  More recently, his interests have turned to system security.

Schneider was named Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso (Norway) in 1996 and was awarded a Doctor of Science honoris causa by the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003 for his work in computer dependability and security. The U.S. National Academy of Engineering elected Schneider to membership in 2011, the Norges Tekniske Vitenskapsakademi (Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences) named him a foreign member in 2010, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences elected him to membership in 2017.

In addition, Schneider has testified about cybersecurity research at hearings of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee (subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats, and Capabilities), as well as the Committee on Science and Technology (subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and subcommittee on Research and Science Education).