Michael Schroeder is a computer scientist perhaps best known as the co-inventor of the Needham–Schroeder protocol. In 2001 he co-founded the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab and was the Assistant Managing Director until the lab was disbanded in 2014. Starting in 1976 he has been on the MIT EECS department faculty, at Xerox PARC, and at the DEC Systems Research Center. His areas of research include computer security, distributed systems and operating systems.