Principal architect of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model and protocols, Chapin is widely recognized as a leader in the networking industry and the Internet community, having contributed to the development of technologies, standards, and governance structures for the Internet since 1977. He has been a partner with Interisle Consulting Group, a consortium of individual consulting practices that focused on the secure commercial deployment of Internet technologies. His broad experience and deep insight have been invaluable to Interisle's clients, who have benefited from his ability to focus both a powerful intellect and the skills of a seasoned diplomat on problems ranging from network architecture and design to organizational dynamics and business strategy.
He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and before co-founding Interisle, he served as Chief Scientist at NextHop Technologies, an Internet routing software company. Before joining NextHop, Chapin served as Chief Scientist at BBN Technologies, the company that actually did invent the Internet in 1969. He chaired the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), and the ANSI and ISO standards groups responsible for Network and Transport layer standards.
He is a founding trustee of the Internet Society, and in 1997 co-founded the Wiley Networking Council publication series at John Wiley & Sons. Chapin served as a Director of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from October 2001 to May 2004. He has served as the chairman of ICANN's Technical Review Panel, which was responsible for assessing the impact of new Domain Name System (DNS) registry services on the security and stability of the Internet, and the USA representative to the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Technical Committee on Communication Systems (TC6).
He completed a six-year term as the USA representative to the NATO Science Committee's networking panel, which brought high-speed Internet access to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the southern Caucasus. Chapin is the co-author of the seminal "Open Systems Networking—TCP/IP and OSI", published in 1993 by Addison-Wesley, which is considered to be the definitive treatment of the emergence of modern Internet technology. He has written many other papers and articles over the past 30 years, including the original specification of the Internet standards process operated by the IETF.
He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Cornell University. His professional interests include Internet routing and traffic engineering, naming and addressing, information security and personal privacy, and electronic payment systems. Chapin lives with his wife and two daughters in Hopkinton, MA (USA).
