Frank Moss is a researcher, technology and biotechnology entrepreneur, academic and author. Moss was the director of the MIT Media Lab from 2006 to 2011, where he was the Wiesner Professor of the Practice of Media Arts and Sciences and the principal investigator for the New Media Medicine research group, which he founded.

He is the author of The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives, published in 2011.

From 2007 to 2011, Moss was a trustee of Princeton University, where he served as Chairman of the Alumni Affairs Committee; currently, he is a member of the Leadership Advisory Council for the Princeton School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is a trustee of the Jackson Laboratory and also a member of the External Advisory Council of the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at the Cincinnati Children's Medical Center. Moss also served on the leadership advisory council of the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation.

Moss was born Franklin Moss on April 20, 1949 in Baltimore, Maryland, where he attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. His father was Sam Moss, a local radio personality who had a weekly radio show, The Sam Moss Show, in Baltimore for 30 years. Moss's mother Rose co-produced and co-wrote the show. He is the middle child with older brother Billy, a successful restaurateur and restaurant business broker; and younger sister Ivy, an environmentalist.

As a teenager, Moss became enthralled with America’s fledgling space program, which informed his choice of higher education and career. He received a BS in aerospace and mechanical sciences from Princeton University, and both his MS and PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. While a research assistant at the Draper Laboratory at MIT, Moss designed the original prototype for the Space Shuttle digital horizontal flight system. In the course of his academic work at MIT, he became exposed to high-performance computing and networking technologies that would later become part of the Internet. His interest in the broad commercial potential of these technologies led him to pursue his professional career in the computer and software industries.

He began his career at IBM's scientific center in Haifa, Israel, where he also taught at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He later held various research and management positions at IBM's Yorktown Heights (NY) Research Center, working on advanced development projects in the areas of networking and distributed computing; and executive management positions at Apollo Computer Inc. and Lotus Development Corporation.

During his career in the computer and software industries, Moss served as CEO and chairman of Tivoli Systems Inc., a pioneer in the distributed systems management field, which he took public in 1995 and subsequently merged with IBM in 1996. Tivoli was a venture-backed startup that successfully competed with larger companies to redefine and standardize the technology behind network and systems management. The acquisition by IBM became more of a “reverse merger,” in that Tivoli became the network and systems management division of IBM and one of its largest software businesses, growing to several billion dollars. Moss became the general manager of the Tivoli business at IBM; he retired from Tivoli as chairman in 1998.

He also co-founded several other companies, including Stellar Computer, Inc., a developer of graphic supercomputers; and Bowstreet, Inc., a pioneer in the emerging field of Web services that was acquired by IBM and where he was chairman. Moss also served on the advisory board of nLayers Inc., which was later acquired by EMC. In 2009,he co-founded and was a director of Bluefin Labs, which uses machine learning technology to provide brands, agencies and media companies with real-time TV audience response insights through social media analysis. Bluefin was sold to Twitter in 2013 for a reported $100 Million.