Urs Hölzle

Urs Hölzle is Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google. In this capacity Urs oversees the design, installation, and operation of the servers, networks, and datacenters that power Google's services. Through efficiency innovations, Urs and his team have reduced the energy used by Google data centers to less than 50% of the industry average. Urs is renowned for both his red socks and his free-range Leonberger, Yoshka (Google's top dog).

Urs grew up in Switzerland and received a master's degree in computer science from ETH Zurich and, as a Fulbright scholar, a Ph.D. from Stanford. While at Stanford (and then a small start-up that was later acquired by Sun Microsystems) he invented fundamental techniques used in most of today's leading Java compilers. Before joining Google he was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a Fellow of the ACM and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences.