Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA (born 8 June 1955^[1]), also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989^[2] and on 25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliauand a young student at CERN, he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet.^[3]

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).^[4] He is a director of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI),^[5] and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.^[6][7]

In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work.^[8] In April 2009, he was elected as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, based in Washington, D.C.^[9][10]