Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering. Life and career Vinton Gray Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut on June 23, 1943, the son of Muriel (née Gray) and Vinton Thurston Cerf. Cerf attended Van Nuys High School with Jon Postel and Steve Crocker. While in high school, Cerf worked at Rocketdyne on the Apollo program for six months and helped write statistical analysis software for the non-destructive tests of the F-1 engines. Cerf received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Stanford University. After college, Cerf worked at IBM as a systems engineer supporting QUIKTRAN for two years. Cerf and his wife Sigrid both have hearing deficiencies; they met at a hearing aid agent's practice in the 1960s, which led him to becoming an advocate for accessibility. They would later join a Methodist church. He left IBM to attend graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned his M.S. degree in 1970 and his PhD in 1972. Cerf studied under Professor Gerald Estrin and worked in Professor Leonard Kleinrock's data packet networking group that connected the first two nodes of the ARPANET, the first node on the Internet, and "contributed to a host-to-host protocol" for the ARPANET. While at UCLA, Cerf met Bob Kahn, who was working on the ARPANET system architecture. Cerf chaired the International Networking Working Group. He wrote the first TCP protocol with Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, called Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program (), published in December 1974. Cerf worked as assistant professor at Stanford University from 1972 to 1976 where he conducted research on packet network interconnection protocols and co-designed the DoD TCP/IP protocol suite with Kahn. Cerf worked at the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 1973 to 1982 and funded various groups to develop TCP/IP, packet radio (PRNET), packet satellite (SATNET) and packet security technology. These efforts were rooted in the needs of the military. In the late 1980s, Cerf moved to MCI where he helped develop the first commercial email system (MCI Mail)