Andrew Herbert is a Microsoft distinguished engineer and is the managing director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. Herbert joined Microsoft Research in 2001 as an assistant director. In March 2003 he succeeded the founding director, Roger Needham.

Herbert’s research interests include networks, operating systems, programming languages, and distributed information sharing.

Before joining Microsoft Research in 2001, he was director of Advanced Technology at Citrix Systems Inc., where he was instrumental in steering the company toward Internet thin-client technologies and initiating development of products for Web-based application deployment and for the emerging application service provider market.

Herbert joined Citrix in 1998 from Digitivity Inc., which he founded in 1996 to develop a product to enable secure deployment of Java clients for business-to-business applications. Digitivity was a spinoff from APM Ltd., a research and consulting company Herbert founded in 1985. APM managed ANSA, an industry-sponsored program of research and advanced development into the use of distributed systems technology to support applications integration in enterprisewide systems. ANSA’s work included research on support for interactive multimedia services, object technology for World Wide Web applications, distributed systems management, mobile object systems and security for electronic commerce.

Before starting ANSA in 1985, Herbert was a faculty member in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England, where he worked with Roger Needham and Maurice Wilkes on seminal developments in local area networks (LANs) and distributed computing.

Herbert is a fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of St. John’s College Cambridge, and a liveryman of the City of London Worshipful Company of Information Technologists. In 1975 he graduated from the University of Leeds with a B.Sc. in computational science and in 1978 with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in computer science.