Retiring with Dr. Ethan Miller

In July 2023, Dr. Ethan Miller and I retired together from the University of California, Santa Cruz. I had been on the faculty for 35 years. Dr. Miller has been my closest colleague and friend for decades.

With Dr. Ethan Miller, celebrating our retirement.

We built the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC) and the Center for Research in Systems and Storage (CRSS) together. In those laboratories, we worked with students, fellow faculty members, and colleagues from industry on file systems, archival storage, reliability, and security. The center’s archive records the work and the many people who contributed to it.

Dr. Miller has explained his reasons for retiring in his own blog. I had many reasons of my own, some of which need to remain private.

COVID ruined collaborative laboratory research as I had known it. Being together in the laboratory had been central to how we worked. The pandemic disrupted the daily contact and the conversations through which students and faculty worked out problems together.

The undergraduates seemed to have changed as well. These were among my reasons for retiring, though they were not the whole explanation.

It was time.