Matthew (Matt) David Welsh

Co-founder of the Linux Documentation Project, Welsh is a computer scientist and software engineer. He has also served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In November 2010, five months after being granted tenure at Harvard, he announced that he was leaving Harvard for a position at Google. At Google, Welsh has worked in the area of mobile computing, systems, and networks.

He is also the author of the Running Linux and Installation and Getting Started guide, and the Linuxdoc SGML (now SGMLtools) documentation system. In addition, he has authored several Linux HOWTOs, the LinuxDoc format and articles in the Linux Journal. Welsh graduated from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) in 1992, a two-year, public residential high school located in Durham, North Carolina, that focuses on the intensive study of science, mathematics and technology. The school accepts rising juniors from across North Carolina and enrolls them through senior year.

Though NCSSM is a public school, enrollment is limited, and applicants underwent a highly competitive review process prior to admission. In 2014 he gave the Commencement address at NCSSM. He received his B.S. degree from Cornell University in 1996 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999 and 2002, respectively. His thesis title was "An Architecture for Highly Concurrent, Well-Conditioned Internet Services."

Welsh spent the 1996–1997 school year at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and at the University of Glasgow. From August 2002 to July 2003, he served as a Senior Researcher at Intel Research, Berkeley. From 2003 to 2011, he was with Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; first as Assistant Professor of Computer Science until 2010, and then as the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science until July 1, 2011.

While at Harvard, he taught the Operating System class in which Mark Zuckerberg was a student. Welsh was later portrayed by actor Brian Palermo in the movie The Social Network featuring Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook. He was reportedly paid $200 for his PowerPoint slides used in the movie. In 2010, he wrote a blog titled "In Defense of Mark Zuckerberg."

He is the co-author with Dalheimer and Matthias Kalle (2005) of "Running Linux" (5th ed.), O'Reilly Media, ISBN 978-0596007607, Retrieved 2013-08-23; and with Phil Hughes, David Bandel, Boris Beletsky, Sean Dreilinger, Robert Kiesling, Evan Liebovitch, and Henry Pierce, of "Linux Installation and Getting Started" (2nd ed.), Specialized Systems Consultants, ISBN 1-57831-001-6, (1998) [1992–1996], Retrieved 2009-08-14.