Richard Ward is a Distinguished Engineer who leads the Windows Mobile Labs team, where he is chartered with the incubation and prototyping of new technologies in the mobile space. Ward joined the Windows Mobile team after a long stay in Windows, where he headed the Core Architecture team, a team that watched over system-wide design issues for the next versions of Windows.  In that role, he was focused on broad design issues such as state separation and management for both Windows components as well as applications. 

Prior to that role, Ward was the lead security architect for Windows, working with a small team of others working to address the security needs of Microsoft customers.  This role capped a long tenure in the security group, where he ran the security development team for Windows NT 3.5, Windows NT 4.0, and the core security group for Windows 2000. 

During this time, Ward wrote the first SSL and Kerberos implementations for Microsoft, and oversaw the evolution of the original NTLM authentication protocol.  Ward joined Microsoft in 1989 as a security developer for the LAN Manager product line. 

Ward holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Williams College.  Outside of Microsoft, he enjoys photography, cycling, music production, and spending time with his wife and son.