Harry J. Saal

Ph.D. (Director)

Dr. Harry J. Saal was the founder and CEO of Network General Corporation, the first company wholly dedicated to the area of network diagnostics and the creator of the eponymous “Sniffer” network analyzer.
In 2002, Dr. Saal was chosen by the US Department of Justice to lead the Technical Committee charged with monitoring and enforcing the Microsoft Antitrust case. He served as Chairman of the Committee through the May 2011 expiration of the Judgment. Until 2020, he served as the Chair of Retrotope, Inc. a pharmaceutical startup, based in Silicon Valley. Dr. Saal is confident that the compounds under development stand an excellent chance of revolutionizing the treatment and prevention of a wide variety of untreatable neurodegenerative diseases of aging.

From 1993 through 1995, Dr. Saal served as founding CEO and President of Smart Valley, Inc., a non-profit organization chartered to create a regional electronic community based on an advanced information infrastructure and the collective ability to use it. He has served as Director of several private and publicly traded high technology firms. He currently serves on the boards of the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA), American Institute of Mathematics, Numenta, Inc. and FedArb, Inc. Ernst & Young named Dr. Saal the Bay Area 1990 Software Entrepreneur of the Year and he is also the recipient of the ADL Torch of Liberty Award, the ACM/Computer Museum 1994 Computer Bowl MVP, and the JNF Tree of Life Award.

He is active in philanthropy and community affairs, serving as Chair of the Arthritis Foundation Northern California Chapter for 2010 and 2011, among others. From 1998 through 2003 he served as President of Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley, a non-profit organization which links a network of public and private cultural agencies and organizations to enhance arts and culture in Silicon Valley. He served as the Chair of ZERO1, an organization that is enhancing the intersection of art and technology in Silicon Valley and internationally and Chair of the San Jose Airport Arts Oversight Commission. He has served as Chairman of the Board of the Community Foundation Silicon Valley (from whom he received the 1996 Corporate Community Involvement Award) and Vice Chairman of the American Leadership Forum, Silicon Valley Chapter; in 1995 received their John W. Gardner Leadership Award. In 1997, Columbia University awarded Dr. Saal its highest honor, the John Jay Award.

Dr. Saal is a magna cum laude graduate of Columbia University where he received his Ph.D. in High Energy Physics in 1969. He then served as Deputy Director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center’s Computation Group and later as Visiting Associate Professor of Computer Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo. From 1973 to 1978, he worked for IBM, at the IBM Scientific Center in Haifa, Israel and the IBM General Products Division in San Jose.