Ethan graduated from Brown University with an Sc.B. in computer science in 1987, and got an M.S. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in computer science in 1990 and 1995, respectively. He was part of the RAID group at Berkeley, where he did his dissertation work on using randomized data placement for high-performance file systems, a project that laid the foundation for his later work as part of the team that developed the Ceph file system.
Ethan retired from active service at UC Santa Cruz on July 1, 2023. Please read this blog post for details. Since he is an emeritus faculty member, he doesn't have regular teaching duties or service duties. His plan is to continue my research collaborations with colleagues, including those in the Storage Systems Research Center.
Ethan is the Director Emeritus of the NSF I/UCRC Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS) and the Associate Director of the Storage Systems Research Center at UC Santa Cruz, where he explores issues in file and storage systems and, more generally, distributed systems and operating systems.