Dr. Karen Sollins received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Swarthmore College, and Master's and Doctoral degrees from M.I.T. in Computer Science. She is currently a Principal Research Scientist in the Advanced Network Architecture Group at CSAIL.

Her research interests have focused on support for network based systems and applications. Her doctoral thesis was on distributed name management. She has published papers on an authentication protocol and global naming. More recently she led the Information Mesh Project, addressing architectural problems of an extremely long-lived global mesh of information, followed by work on issues of extreme scaling in the net. She was a guest editor of a special issue of Personal Communication on Smart Environments in October of 2000.

In addition to publishing, she has taken her work to the standards community, and chaired a research group consisting of a mix of academics and members of industry to address infrastructural problems. During 1999 and 2000, she was a senior program director for networking research at the National Science Foundation, on leave from LCS.