Philip Brighten Godfrey

Philip Brighten Godfrey is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Technical Director at VMware (formerly Broadcom). He co-founded network verification startup Veriflow, which was acquired in 2019. His research focuses on networked systems, blending theoretical and practical approaches to low-latency networking, software-defined architectures, microservices communication, and machine learning for network optimization.

• Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science (UC Berkeley, 2009), B.S. in Computer Science (Carnegie Mellon, 2002)

His work spans data center design, network verification (e.g., VeriFlow), congestion control (PCC Vivace), and innovative projects like cISP (Speed-of-Light Internet). Recent publications address microservice tracing (TraceWeaver), fault localization (Flock), and XR device offloading (XRgo).

Notable awards include the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, and multiple best paper recognitions. He has chaired SIGCOMM and HotNets, and his teaching excellence in courses like CS 538 Advanced Computer Networks has been repeatedly recognized.

• Scientific Honors
  • ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award
  • NSF CAREER Award (2012)
  • Sloan Research Fellowship (2014)
  • Best Paper Awards (SIGCOMM, HotSDN, CoNEXT)
  • IEEE ComSoc Data Storage Best Paper
  • Engineering Council Outstanding Advisor Award (2015)

Godfrey leads research in the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) and contributes to the LDOS NSF Expeditions project. His group advises Ph.D. students on topics ranging from network verification to XR systems optimization, with alumni now at Meta, Google, and academic institutions like ETH Zurich.