Portal:Google/Selected biography/2

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, businessman, as well as the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc.. Schmidt is also a former member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. He has served on the Board of Trustees for Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University.

Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Yorktown High School (Virginia), Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a BSEE in 1976. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979, for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems. He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction).