Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955(1955-04-27) in Washington, D.C.) is Chairman and CEO of Google Inc. and a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. He also sits on the Board of Trustees for Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University. He lives in Atherton, California with his wife Wendy.

After graduating from Yorktown High School (Virginia), Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a BSEE in 1976. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979, for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments, and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems. He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Business School as a part time professor.

Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies, including Bell Labs, Zilog and Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He joined Sun Microsystems in 1983, led its Java development efforts and rose to become Chief Technology Officer. In 1997, he was appointed CEO of Novell.