Steven Richard Bratt (pronounced: 'braht') (born February 10, 1957) serves as Chief Technology Officer and President, Standards Development for GS1. He previously served as the founding Chief Executive Officer of the World Wide Web Foundation and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Early history

Steve Bratt is the first of son Richard Wiegand and Janet Lewis Bratt. He has a brother, Carl Bratt. Born in New York City while his father was in the Navy, the family moved shortly thereafter to Syracuse, New York. He attended Walberta Park and Cherry Road Elementary Schools and Westhill High School.

Bratt received a B.S. in Geological Sciences from Pennsylvania State University in 1979. He received his Ph.D. in Geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.

Starting in 1985, Bratt led research initiatives at Science Applications International Corporation and later served as the program manager at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency developing advanced concepts for real-time global sensor monitoring, intelligent data analysis, and international telecommunications. By 1993, Bratt was integrating Web technologies into monitoring systems as a means of data sharing and collaboration. Bratt was a scientific advisor to the U.S. delegation to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland from their start in 1993 through their conclusion in 1996. In 1997, he was named the first Coordinator of the International Data Centre in Vienna, Austria of the preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization.