Leonidas Kontothanassis is the Inaugural MassMutual Professor of the Practice in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University, where he also serves as Director of Industry Engagement. Professors of the Practice such as Kontothanassis are distinguished practitioners who share their professional knowledge and experience through teaching in the classroom and laboratory research focused on societally relevant real-world problems. He earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Rochester in 1996 and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece in 1990. His extensive career history includes the role of Senior Engineering Director at Facebook, a 12-year tenure at Google, and work at Akamai, with over 20 years of experience building and managing large Content Delivery Networks. Kontothanassis has been an adjunct faculty member at Boston University since 1999 and joined the CDS faculty full-time in 2022.

Kontothanassis's academic interests and expertise include the design and operation of Internet-scale systems, computer networking, software engineering, data engineering, and the application of computing tools to urban planning. He is committed to equipping CDS undergraduate students with 'hard skills' for impactful careers, particularly in navigating diverse cloud environments exemplified by Google Cloud's 106 products. He seeks to teach distinctions between storage systems like Spanner, Cassandra, and SQL to shorten industry onboarding from six months to a year. As organizer of the CDS Industry Connections Lecture Series, he facilitates connections between students and industry leaders. Kontothanassis has received ACM SIGCOMM recognition for his significant impact on computer networking and a technical Emmy for engineering the system that made large-scale video consumption on YouTube possible. His return to academia after industry reflects his philosophy that 'Learning is something you should never stop doing.'

Professional Email: kthanas2@bu.edu