When David J. Farber accepted the Stevens Honor Award in 2014, he made two things abundantly clear: He loved to learn and he loved to teach.

Farber, an Emeritus Trustee who was inducted into the Pioneers Circle of the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013, passed away on Feb. 7, 2026, at the age of 91. He was still teaching through late January as a distinguished professor at Keio University in Tokyo, where he also served as the co-chair of the Cyber Civilization Research Center. His lifelong passion for education was only strengthened during his time at Stevens.

“As a Stevens undergraduate, I had a ball here. It taught me many, many things outside of electrical engineering,” he said during his acceptance speech at the 2014 Stevens Award Gala. “The teachers here were just superb. Dr. Strong, who supervised our senior project, was an inspiration and got me very interested in what became my career.”

As a Stevens undergraduate, Farber earned an M.E. degree focusing on electrical engineering in 1956. He then started his career at Bell Labs — where he helped design the first electronic switching system — and learned under pioneers such as two-time Nobel Prize winning physicist John Bardeen and Claude Shannon, the “father of the information age.” These teachers, he said, taught him theory but did it in a way using the research they were conducting right in their laboratories.

“What that taught me is something that has stayed with me throughout my entire academic career: Students deserve the best faculty that we can supply them, and our faculty has to be current,” he said. “It has to be people doing research who are on the forefront of information because they’ll transmit that love of science and engineering to their students.”

Farber himself transmitted that love when he moved on to academia, holding various appointments and professorships at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pennsylvania, UC Irvine and the University of Delaware. He wrote several computer languages that helped develop the early web and taught many who went on to contribute their own innovations, earning him the distinction of being dubbed the “grandfather of the internet.”

Throughout his career, Farber served as chief technologist for the FCC, and on the U.S. Presidential Advisory Committee on Information Technology, among others.

He was inducted into the Stevens Hall of Achievement in 2016 and continued to invest in the success of the university through the Farber Chair in computer science, a faculty fellowship in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and prizes that reward our seniors for their own societal impact.

Farber was predeceased by his wife, Gloria (G.G.), and their son, Joe. He is survived by his son, Manny, and two grandsons.

– Rebecca Markley