Jim Waldo is a Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, where he teaches courses in distributed systems and privacy. He also teaches topics in technology and policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the Chief Technology Officer for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and is a Distinguished Engineer with Harvard University Information Technology.

Jim has designed clouds at VMWare, and was a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he was the technical lead of the Darkstar project. Prior to (re)joining Sun Labs, he was the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java. Jim has also done research and product development in the areas of medical sensing, object-oriented programming and systems, distributed computing, and user environments.

Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text and internationalization. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first OMG CORBA specification. He edited the book The Evolution of C++: Language Design in the Marketplace of Ideas (MIT Press), and was one of the authors of The Jini Specification (Addison Wesley). He is also the author of Java: The Good Parts.

Jim received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He also holds M.A. degrees in both linguistics and philosophy from the University of Utah. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.