Brighten Godfrey

Professor Brighten Godfrey is a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and an affiliate of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley (2009) and a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University (2002). His research spans networked systems with a focus on low-latency networking, software-defined networks, microservices, and machine learning for networks.

• Ph.D. (2009) and B.S. (2002) in Computer Science
• Professor at UIUC since 2021
• Technical Director at VMware (acquired Veriflow in 2019)

His recent publications address microservice tracing, cluster verification, and mobile acceleration, with high-impact applications in XR systems and low-latency networks. Awards include the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, and multiple best paper and dataset awards. He has chaired program committees for SIGCOMM and HotNets.

Teaching honors include Excellent Teacher and Outstanding Advising Awards. His research group has produced alumni now at institutions like Meta, Google, and ETH Zurich. Current projects include Service Layer Traffic Engineering (SLATE) and Learning-Based Congestion Control (Aurora, PCC).