Radia Joy Perlman is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the Internet. She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet", a title that she did not like. Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization – for example, enabling today's link-state routing protocols to be more robust, scalable, and easy to manage.