Stroustrup: Biographical Information
You can find a few more personal details and some information about the birth of C++ in Steve Lohr's Go to: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Scientists and Iconoclasts who were the Hero Programmers of the Software Revolution. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04225-2; 2001 and also in Paul McJones' interview for The Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.
In 1979, Bjarne Stroustrup, together with his wife and daughter, moved to New Jersey to join the Computer Science Research Center of Bell Telephone Laboratories (colloqually know as 127 or 1127). Over the years, they lived in Summit, Meyersville, and Watchung - all about 10 minutes drive from Bell Labs' main research site in Murray Hill. A son was born in Meyersville. After the 1984 break-up of the Bell System, Bell Labs became AT&T Bell Labs, and after the 1995 break-up of AT&T, AT&T Bell Labs was itself split into AT&T Labs and Lucent Technologies Bell Labs. From its inception, Bjarne was a member of AT&T Labs - Research, the half of Bell Labs Information Sciences Research that AT&T kept to itself as Lucent and NCR were spun off.
Bjarne was the head of the Large-Scale Programming Research Department from its creation in AT&T Bell Labs until late 2002 when he joined the computer science department of Texas A&M University. He retained a link with AT&T Labs - Research as an AT&T Fellow until 2012.
From 2002 to 2014, Bjarne was the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science Professor at Texas A&M University. He and his wife lived in a house in a quiet wooded area of College Station, Texas. After leaving for NYC in January 2014, he retains a link to TAMU as a University Distinguished Professor. He was a member of the Parasol group in the Computer Science and Engineering Department.
Over the years, Bjarne has spent significant time in the computer science departments of Cambridge, Columbia, and Princeton. In particular:
- Fall 2011: On sabattical ("development leave") in the Princeton CS department.
- Spring 2012: On sabattical ("development leave") in the Cambridge Computer Lab and overseas fellow of Churchill College.
From January 2014 to April 2022, Bjarne was a Managing Director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley in New York City. In 2019, he was promoted to be Morgan Stanley's first Technical Fellow. He retired on April 2, 2022 to spend more time of non-commercial C++ work, traveling, and with his family.
From January 2014 to July 2022, Bjarne was a Visiting Professor in Columbia University's Computer Science department. As on July 2022, Bjarne is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University.
The move to New York was prompted by Marian and Bjarne wanting to be nearer to their children and (especially) grandchildren. Bjarne also wanted to refresh his acquaintance with critical software development. Academic concerns can distract from work aiming squarely at solving industrial problens (e.g., of scale and reliability).
As of January 2021, Bjarne is a technology advisor to Metaspex, a company that offers direct translation of Specifications to high-performance full-featured Cloud applications.
As of February 2026, Bjarne is a senior advisor to YetiWare, a company that aims to solve fundamental parallel programming problems.
He and his wife live in New York City; their daughter is a medical doctor and their son is a research professor in systems biology.