Darrell and Elaine Long
Darrell Long is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was the inaugural holder of the Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair in Storage Systems Research. Over a career spanning more than three decades, his work focused on data storage systems, distributed computing, and cyber security. He was the founding director of the Storage Systems Research Center at UCSC, a program that trained more than twenty Ph.D. students and became internationally recognized for its contributions to storage architecture, reliability, and secure systems.
His research helped shape modern approaches to metadata management, secure storage, deduplication, erasure coding, and large-scale distributed systems. He worked closely with IBM Research for over fifteen years, contributing to product development and earning multiple patents. He played a key role in the design of Storage Tank, which became IBM’s TotalStorage/SAN products. He was one of the architects of Ceph, the leading exascale file system. He served as editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Storage and the IEEE Letters of the Computer Society, and in 2002, he founded the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST).
Darrell is a Fellow of the IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recognized for his work in storage system architecture and performance. Since 2002, he has been a member of JASON, an independent group of elite scientists that advises the U.S. government on matters of national security. His contributions there have spanned quantum computing, nuclear deterrence, cryptography, satellite systems, covert communications, and cyber security. He has also served on advisory panels for the National Research Council, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the Intelligence Community, focusing on emerging threats, nuclear security, and advanced computing.
He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego. Over the years, Darrell has held visiting positions at Sorbonne Université, Université Paris–Descartes, Université Paris–Dauphine, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, the University of Technology Sydney, the University of California San Diego, the United States Naval Postgraduate School, the Center for Communications Research, and CERN. He is also Professor ad Honorem at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay.
From his earliest memories, he wanted to be a scientist. As a child, he didn’t know the term “scientific method,” but he knew that scientists were the ones who tried to understand how the world worked. That desire shaped his life. The professorship he and his wife Elaine have endowed reflects their shared belief in science, education, and mentorship, and their hope that future scholars will continue asking important questions.
Darrell fell in love with Elaine when he was nine years old, but she didn’t know it. Little boys are afraid of little girls, so he admired her from afar. She moved away during high school, and both of them grew up, married, and raised families. But in 2014, they found each other again, and in 2016, they were married, and that little boy, who is now an old man, feels he is the luckiest man in the world.
