Laura Haas

Best known for her work on the Starburst query processor, from which DB2 UDB was developed, Haas became a 2009 IBM Fellow and has served as Director of Computer Science at IBM Almaden Research Center from 2005; she also served as a "catalyst" for ambitious research across IBM's worldwide research labs. Previously, she was responsible for Information Integration Solutions (IIS) architecture in IBM's Software Group after leading the IIS development team through its first two years. She joined the development team in 2001 as Manager of DB2 UDB Query Compiler development. Before that, Haas was a research staff member and manager at the Almaden lab for nearly twenty years.

In IBM Research, she worked on and managed a number of exploratory projects in distributed database systems. She is best known for her work on the Starburst query processor (from which DB2 UDB was developed); on Garlic, a system which allowed federation of heterogeneous data sources; and on Clio, the first semi-automatic tool for heterogeneous schema mapping. Garlic technology, married with DB2 UDB query processing, was the basis for the IBM WebSphere Information Server's federation capabilities, while Clio capabilities were a core differentiator in IBM's Rational Data Architect.

Haas has been an active member of the database community. She served as Vice President of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees from 2004–2009 and as Vice Chair of ACM SIGMOD from 1989–1997. She received several IBM awards for Outstanding Technical Achievement and Outstanding Innovation, and an IBM Corporate Award for her work on federated database technology. In 2010, Haas was recognized with the Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award.

She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the IBM Academy of Technology, an ACM Fellow, and Vice Chair of the Board of the Computing Research Association. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, and her Bachelor's degree from Harvard University.