I grew up in North Carolina, the son of a penniless, peg-legged sharecropper and a cross-eyed taxidermist. I never seemed to fit in at school, largely due to a full set of teeth and a lack of inbreeding. My teachers regarded me as a troublemaker, partly due to my insistence that the Abolitionists weren't "effete liberal tree-huggers" and that Hitler was in no way French. I also found it difficult to socialize with the other children. Partly because I was simply shy, partly because I couldn't afford to get all gussied up like my more affluent peers, I could never quite bring myself to attend the weekly lynchings that provided the primary means of socialization in our cozy little town. I spent most of my days reading the works of Marx, Sartre, and Seuss, eventually writing an anthology for my own edification entitled, aptly, "The Cat In the Hat Produced By Wage Slaves In the Ultimately Pointless Void."
    I grew older in the humid southern heat, and like many boys my age, my first sexual experience consisted of awkward, dimly-lit gropings with a liberally-minded sheep named Muriel. Apparently in my attempt to sneak a copy of "The Joy of Sex" into my bedroom I had mistakenly grabbed "The Joy of Cooking." Though generally tolerant of my inept fumblings, Muriel drew the line when I attempted, in the heat of passion, to douse her in a light mint cream sauce and baste her to a golden brown. We have not spoken since.

Actually, I was valedictorian of Chapel Hill High School, went to Harvard, worked at Microsoft, became a developer at Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley lab, got my master's at the University of Washington, and eventually came back to grad school here at Harvard University.  But that's much less interesting.

• scientific data management
• cooperative distributed systems
• operating systems
• networking
• software tools
• synthetic biology (programming with bacteria! Whee!)

Papers

• An Overview of the Singularity Project
  Galen Hunt et al.
  Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2005-135
  October 2005
  
  Described uniform extensibility mechanisms for a type-safe, garbage-collected experimental OS.
  
  
• Boxwood: Abstractions as the Foundation for Storage Infrastructure
  John McCormick, Nicholas Murphy, Chandu Thekkath, and Lidong Zhou
  6th Symposium on Operating System Principles
  December 2004
  
  Explored using abstractions like B-trees as a low-level storage interface rather than traditional blocks.
  
  
• On the Design of a New CPU Architecture for Pedagogical Purposes
  Dan Ellard, David Holland, Nicholas Murphy, and Margo Seltzer
  Proceedings of the Workshop on Computer Architecture Education
  May 2002
  
  Overview of a simplified CPU architecture intended to be used for pedagogical purposes.