Rich West joined the BU Department of Computer Science in 2000 after completing his PhD at Georgia Tech. Rich is a tinkerer of systems, notably, but not limited to, those in embedded and real-time computing. He likes to take a principled approach to system design, having dabbled in the development of standalone kernels and resource management policies where safety and predictability are paramount. He has studied real-time scheduling and resource management, cache-aware performance of multicore processors, and machine virtualization, amongst other topics. He is currently leading the development of the Quest real-time operating system for multicore processors. Its sister system, Quest-V is a secure and predictable separation kernel that forms a distributed system on a chip, providing efficient, predictable and safe execution of sandboxed guest systems including Linux.