Sue Hares is recognized as one of the world's foremost experts in routing technology. She leads the technology qualification, development and strategic planning functions at NextHop. Prior to launching NextHop Technologies, Ms. Hares spent 13 years at Merit Network Inc. where she most recently directed the Merit GateD Consortium. While at Merit Network Inc., she was a part of the NSFNet project that first deployed border gateway protocol (BGP) in the Internet. Ms. Hares was also a senior engineer at both Allen-Bradley Corp. and ADP, Inc.

An active participant in the design, specification, and implementation of routing protocols, Ms. Hares co-chairs the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF's) inter-domain routing group that is standardizing border gateway protocol. She is a co-author of the latest draft of BGP.

Ms. Hares earned a bachelor of science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan.