Adding to its all-star roster of engineering talent, Google has hired Vinton Cerf, often referred to as the “father of the Internet.”

Cerf, who was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Bill Clinton in 1997, joins Google from MCI, where he is senior vice president of technology strategy.

Cerf, 62, will join Google in early October, along with his chief of staff from MCI.

In the 1970s, Cerf was an assistant professor at Stanford University and scientist for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

While there, he worked on a project to design the next-generation networking protocol for the ARPANET, the forerunner to today’s Internet. The result was a networking protocol called TCP/IP.