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Is an American software executive, engineer, and inventor. McClendon was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for strategic, technical, and managerial leadership resulting in widespread accurate and useful geographic information.
McClendon grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. His childhood home, Meadowbrook Apartments in Lawrence, is the default center point of Google Earth.
He graduated from Lawrence High School in 1982 and from the University of Kansas in 1986 with a degree in electrical engineering.
McClendon spent eight years with Silicon Graphics developing high-end workstation 3D graphics including GT, GTX, RealityEngine, and InfiniteReality, and then was Engineering Director with @Home Network.
McClendon joined Google as an Engineering Director in 2004 when Keyhole was purchased. He was later promoted to Vice President of Geo. Keyhole's main application suite, Earth Viewer, formed the basis of Google Earth.
He left Google to join Uber in June 2015 to work on mapping.
In March 2017, he resigned from Uber to return to his hometown, indicating an interest in Kansas politics.
He currently serves as a research professor at the University of Kansas, having received an honorary doctorate in electrical engineering from the university in 2015.
McClendon holds twenty one issued patents, including nine relating to KML, the XML-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization in two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers.
KML became an open standard for GIS data in 2008.
He and his wife Beth Ellyn McClendon established the McClendon Engineering Scholarship at the university in 2007, donated computer tablets for electrical engineering and computer science students, and provided a Google Liquid Galaxy interactive display at the University's Eaton Hall.
