A graduate of Oxford University, England, Tim Berners-Lee is the 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. He also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). He is co-Director of the new Web Science Research Initiative and is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK. He directs the World Wide Web Consortium, founded in 1994

In 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.

In 2001 he became a fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany's Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit.