Dr. Darrell D. E. Long

Education and early career

Dr. Long earned his B.S. in computer science from San Diego State University in 1984 and began working there as a lecturer in mathematics immediately after graduation. He had already worked as a systems programmer at the university while an undergraduate.

During his doctoral studies at UC San Diego, he also taught computer science as a lecturer, taking responsibility for university courses while still a graduate student. He received his M.S. in 1986 and his Ph.D. in 1988, under the supervision of Dr. Jehan-François Pâris.

Research at UC Santa Cruz

Dr. Long joined UC Santa Cruz in 1988. He built a laboratory with dozens of master’s and doctoral students, supporting the research of several faculty members. Undergraduate researchers also worked in the laboratory, gaining experience in systems research.

In 1991, his work with Dr. Luis-Felipe Cabrera on Swift explored an architecture that separated metadata management from data transfers. His work has also addressed data deduplication, archival storage, reliability, and secure file systems.

He directed the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC) from its establishment in 2001 until 2019, building the center with Dr. Ethan Miller and their colleagues. In 2005, he became the first holder of the Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair in Storage Systems Research. The SSRC’s work on distributed storage included Ceph, whose 2006 paper he coauthored.

In 2013, the Center for Research in Systems and Storage (CRSS) built on the SSRC’s research and industry partnerships. CRSS is the only NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) on the Santa Cruz campus. Dr. Long worked with its founding director, Dr. Ethan Miller, to develop the center and directed it from 2019 to 2023.

Teaching and mentoring

At Santa Cruz, Dr. Long taught introductory programming and data structures, as well as graduate courses in operating systems and cryptography. He supervised undergraduate research and encouraged students to continue to graduate study. Dr. Alexandra Holloway and Dr. Aleatha Parker-Wood were among his undergraduate students who later completed Ph.D.s under his supervision. Dr. Holloway has since led the flight software team for NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He supervised more women to Ph.D. completion than any other faculty member in the Baskin School of Engineering at the time. In 2011, he received the Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity.

Dr. Long has supervised 24 doctoral students to completion. Three have become tenured faculty: Dr. Tsozen Yeh at Fu Jen Catholic University, Dr. Ahmed Amer at Santa Clara University, and Dr. Randal Burns at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Burns now holds the Bill and Lisa Stromberg endowed headship of Hopkins’s Department of Computer Science. Other graduates have led research in industry. The Mathematics Genealogy Project records a further generation of doctoral students advised by Dr. Long’s graduates.

National service and research policy

Dr. Long joined JASON, a scientific advisory group to the U.S. government, in 2002. He has served on National Research Council committees on technology assessment and defense warning, and on the National Academies’ Intelligence Science and Technology Experts Group.

He served on the University of California President’s Council on the National Laboratories and on science and technology, national security, and intelligence committees for Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. He also took part in advisory and review work at Sandia and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. Through the Academic Council’s Special Committee on Laboratory Issues, he also took part in the university’s oversight of the laboratories.

Within the university, he served as vice-chair and then chair of the University of California Committee on Research Policy, and as associate dean of engineering and associate dean for research and graduate studies at Santa Cruz. In 2025, he joined the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

Professional service and later career

Dr. Long was a founding member of the MASCOTS steering committee and served on it for decades, including as chair. He also served as the conference’s general chair and program chair. His other conference work includes dozens of program committee appointments.

He was founding general chair of the Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications in 1994 and founded the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), chairing its first program in January 2002. He has served for several years as general chair of the International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST), where he also serves on the steering committee.

He was editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Storage from 2010 to 2016 and IEEE Letters of the Computer Society from 2017 to 2020.

He became an IEEE Fellow in 2006 and an AAAS Fellow in 2008 for his contributions to computing and storage systems. His international work included visiting appointments in France and Australia, an honorary professorship at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay in 2010, and an Associate Membership of CERN from 2016 to 2019.

Dr. Long retired from UC Santa Cruz in 2023, after 35 years on the faculty and eighteen years in the Malavalli chair. He remains Director, emeritus, of SSRC and CRSS.