Professor Israel Cidon is the director of the Jacobs Technion‑Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. He joined the campus from VMware, where he served as vice president, researcher, and co‑director of the VMware Research Lab. At VMware, Cidon led research and incubation efforts on high‑performance, geo‑distributed networks spanning data centers, the edge, and the cloud.
Before joining VMware, Cidon was a chaired professor at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. His research contributions include new architectures for wireless and wireline networks, multicloud overlay networks, and networks‑on‑chip, for which he was nominated as a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. From 2006 to 2010, he served as dean of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion.
Cidon has also held leadership positions at other industry research centers, including the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York and Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Mountain View, California. He has co‑founded four pioneering technology companies: Micronet, an early innovator in mobile data entry; Actona Technologies, which advanced WAN optimization; Viola Networks, which provided network quality testing and diagnosis; and Sookasa, a software‑as‑a‑service security infrastructure platform.
Cidon is the co‑author of more than 180 peer‑reviewed papers and 80 U.S. patents. He holds bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology.