Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Muriel (née Gray), a homemaker, and Vinton Thurston Cerf, an aerospace executive.[12][13] Cerf's first job after obtaining his B.S. degree in Mathematics from Stanford University was at IBM, where he worked for two years as a systems engineer supporting QUIKTRAN.[1] He left IBM to attend graduate school at UCLA where he earned his M.S. degree in 1970 and his PhD degree in 1972.[4][14] During his graduate student years, he studied under Professor Gerald Estrin, worked in Professor Leonard Kleinrock's data packet networking group that connected the first two nodes of the ARPANet,[15] the predecessor[15] to the Internet, and "contributed to a host-to-host protocol" for the ARPANet.[16] While at UCLA, he also met Robert E. Kahn, who was working on the ARPANet hardware architecture.[16] After receiving his doctorate, Cerf became an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1972–1976, where he conducted research on packet network interconnection protocols and co-designed the DoD TCP/IP protocol suite with Kahn.[16] Cerf then moved to DARPA in 1976, where he stayed until 1982.