Lixia Zhang, a distinguished professor and current Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Networks in the UCLA Computer Science Department, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest professional honors granted to American engineers.
Founded in 1964, the nonprofit National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The academy has more than 2,800 peer-elected members and international members, including senior professionals in business, academia and government who are among the world’s most accomplished engineers. The academy provides expert advice to the nation on matters involving engineering and technology.
Zhang is among 128 members and 22 international members elected this year in recognition of their outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice and education.
Zhang has been an influential researcher for more than three decades in the architecture, performance and security of the internet and its connected devices. She was elected to the academy for her “development of internet protocols which significantly impacted internet quality and performance, and for leadership in setting standards.”
Among Zhang’s most notable achievements is the design of the Resource Reservation Protocol, or RSVP, a robust network signaling protocol used to manage network resources that has sustained internet growth for over two decades. Zhang also coined the term “middlebox” to describe newer network devices such as firewalls and network address translators, which represent departures from the original internet protocol architecture.
In 2010, Zhang was named the lead principal investigator of the Named Data Networking project, a multi-institutional initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to fundamentally rethink and redesign the internet for enhanced quality and security. The idea is to shift from the internet’s current host-based, point-to-point architecture toward a data-centric networking model. This design choice decouples trust in data from trust in hosts, enabling security to be built into the network architecture.
In addition to her scholarly work, Zhang was also an early contributor to the Internet Engineering Task Force, a global body that lays out the technical standards of the internet through the consensus of its participants.
Zhang has received several major international honors for her work, including the 2009 Internet Award from the IEEE and the 2020 SIGCOMM Award for lifetime contributions to the field of communication networks, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications. She is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame and an elected fellow of the ACM and IEEE.
Prior to joining UCLA’s faculty in 1995, Zhang worked at the XEROX Palo Alto Research Center. She earned a master’s degree at California State University, Los Angeles, and a doctorate at MIT.