Phil Emer
Director of Technology and Systems Operations

Phil Emer has spent more than 15 years working at the intersections of networking, research, and academia. Prior to joining the Friday Institute, he was a senior member of the technical staff at MCNC’s Advanced Technologies Group and led many development initiatives with the N.C. Research and Education Network (NCREN), which is regarded as one of the nation’s best statewide research and education networks. NCREN is a high-speed digital network that provides Internet, video, audio and data network services to the University of North Carolina’s 16-campus system, Duke and Wake Forest Universities, and other education institutions.
Before MCNC, Emer spent six years in the Office of Information Technology at NC State University reporting to the Vice Provost for IT. During his tenure at NC State, he directed research and development activities in networking and managed the campus data and video network engineering and operations group. As the Director of R&D activities, Emer worked closely with network researchers in the National Science Foundation-supported Center for Advanced Computing and Communications at NC State, and at Duke University in the deployment of test-bed and measurement infrastructures.

As a founding member of the North Carolina Networking Initiative (NCNI), Emer participated in a number of regional initiatives supporting networking research and the deployment of emerging networking technologies. He also managed NC State University connectivity to and campus support for the vBNS and Abilene research networks.

His career began at IBM where he held engineering positions in the federal systems and network hardware divisions. While at IBM, Emer developed software specifications and reference implementations for large-scale real-time communications and display systems, served on international teams developing advanced network protocols and interfaces, and authored international standards and specifications for Local Area Networking (LAN) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) protocols. 

Emer also served as Vice President of Data Network Engineering for privately held Carolina Broadband, a competitive broadband service provider based in the Carolinas.  He has held various leadership positions including: Center for Advanced Computing and Communications Industry Advisory Board; Chairman, University of North Carolina Network Infrastructure Committee; Adjunct Professor and Visiting Lecturer, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State; Computer Networking Curriculum Committee at NC State; Technical Director of the NC State Multimedia Laboratory; and President of the Southeast Region ATM Interest Group.

Emer holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech and an M.S. in Computer Engineering from NC State University.