Leemon Baird is the Founder and former Chief Scientist of Hedera Hashgraph. He is a co-CEO and Chief Scientist at Hashgraph (fka Swirlds Labs). ^[1][4][10]

Early Life

Leemon Baird grew up in a close-knit family and attended public school, though he often credits his parents and reading as his primary sources of learning. His family moved frequently, about once every three years, due to his father's career as a consultant. His father, who held two PhDs in Mathematics and Physics, was also a college professor in mathematics and physics, an airplane instructor, and later worked in medical physics. His mother was also a mathematics professor. ^[2]

Education

Leemon Baird enrolled in the United States Air Force Academy in 1985 and graduated with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science in 1989. He then went to Carnegie Mellon University in 1996 and completed a PhD in Computer Science. During his studies at Carnegie Mellon, he studied and experimented with machine learning and reinforcement learning with neural networks. ^[3][4]

Career

Leemon started his career by co-founding Trio Security in August 2000 and worked as the Chief Technology Officer until June 2004. A year before leaving Trio Security in June 2003, he became a professor of computer science at the US Air Force Academy until August 2009. ^[4]

After dropping his role at Tri Security, he joined Symbol Technologies, a mobile hardware and equipment company, in June 2004 as director of security engineering until September 2005. After resigning from Symbol Technologies, Leemon co-founded BlueWave Security and stayed as their Chief Technology Officer until January 2012. ^[5]

In August 2009, he became the senior research scientist of the Academy Center for Cyberspace Research and quit in April 2012 to become a consultant. He was also a visiting professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) from January 2011 to June 2011.

In September 2015 Leemon founded Swirlds Inc., a platform that facilitates the development of applications and he serves as the Chief Scientist of the company. ^[11]

Hedera Hashgraph

In January 2018, Leemon founded Hedera Hashgraph, an open-source, eco-friendly public ledger that utilizes the hashgraph consensus. ^[5]

Leemon Baird started by asking himself, “is there a way that you can have computers can come to an agreement with a very high level of security?”. He always thought of this as a “fun math problem" and had high doubts that this was possible. However, in 2015, Leemon realized that hashes from messages can be put in an order with no communication, solving the problem of having extreme speed with high security and inventing the Hashgraph consensus algorithm. ^[9]

" Just get the messages out, and everybody already knows what order they're in. And you don't have to do anything to slow yourself down to reach consensus.”

So with the Hashgraph consensus in hand, he thought that he had to create a public ledger with it, creating Hedera Hashgraph in January 2018. He states that this was not influenced by other blockchain projects like Bitcoin or Ethereum but was just a no-brainer to start a project of his own. ^[2]

"why did we build Hedera? Because it was obvious once you had that math algorithm you could build a better ledger"

As the Chief Scientist of Hedera, Leemon Baird came up with innovative ideas implemented into the ecosystem which led to multiple leading organizations to be part of steering the project. ^[5]

On April 29th, 2022, Leemon Baird dropped his position to take on the new role of co-CEO of Swirlds Labs to bring back value to the Hedera ecosystem. Swirlds Labs rebranded into Hashgraph in July 2024 and Baird serves as the Chief Scientist of the company. ^[8][12]