John C. Eidson received his BS and MS from Michigan State University and his PhD from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering. After receiving the PhD in 1964, he held a postdoctoral position at Stanford University until 1966. From 1967 to 1972 he was with the Central Research 
Laboratory of Varian Associates working on device physics and analytic instrumentation. In 1972 John joined the Central Research Laboratories of the Hewlett-Packard Company working on a variety of projects including analytic instrumentation, electron beam lithography, instrumentation architectures and clock synchronization. When Hewlett-Packard split in 1999 he joined the Central Research Laboratory of Agilent Technologies as a Department Scientist, continuing his work on clock synchronization. His work on clock synchronization is the basis for the IEEE 1588 Standard currently deployed in the telecommunications, industrial automation, data acquisition and power industries. He retired from Agilent in 2009 and since then has been a visiting scholar in the Ptolemy Group at the University of California at Berkeley, http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.htm, where he continues his work on clock synchronization and the uses of synchronized clocks in distributed cyber-physical systems.
In 2006 he was elected an IEEE Fellow. He received the IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Society’s Technical Award in 2007 and was also a co-recipient of the Agilent Laboratories Barney Oliver Award for Innovation.
His professional activities include serving as co-chair of the current IEEE 1588 Standards committee, and as chair of this committee for the 2002 and 2008 editions. John was heavily involved in the development of the IEEE 1451.2 Standard and editor of the IEEE 1451.1 Standard. From 2004 to 2009 he was a member of the technical committee of the LXI Consortium and from 2003-2006 he was co-chair of the NIST Workshops on IEEE 1588 and co-chair of the ISPCS 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Precision Clock Synchronization for Measurement, Control, and Communication. John has served on the steering committee of ISPCS from 2008 to the present and was local arrangements co-chair in 2012.
He is the author of a book on IEEE 1588, author or co-author of 10 journal articles, 4 technical magazines articles, 17 conference publications, and has given numerous invited lectures on IEEE 1588. He holds 41 US patents.