Dr. Patricia G. Selinger

An American computer scientist and IBM Fellow, she is a world-renowned pioneer in relational database management and inventor of the technique of cost-based query optimization that has been adopted by nearly all relational database vendors and is now taught in virtually every university database course. She received her A.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. She ran the IBM Almaden Research Computer Science department and then established and managed the Database Technology Institute whose mission is to accelerate technology into IBM's database products. The DBTI organization invented and partnered with IBM development to deliver a number of fundamental technologies in DB2 for OS/390, IMS, and DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows. The Database Technology Institute is considered one of the most successful examples of a fast technology pipeline from research to development and personally has technical contributions in the areas of database optimization, data parallelism, distributed data, and unstructured data management. She played a fundamental role in the development of System R, a pioneering relational database implementation and wrote the canonical paper on relational query optimization. The dynamic programming algorithm for determining join order proposed in that paper still forms the basis for most of the query optimizers used in modern relational systems. Before her retirement, she was the Vice President of Data Management Architecture and Technology at IBM. She is now a project consultant for IBM. She was made an IBM Fellow for her exceptional technical work and leadership in relational databases in 1994; the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1999, and won the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 2002, the highest ACM award given in the area of data management and has received the ACM Systems Software Award for her work on System R. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2009). She has published more than 40 refereed papers and is a co-holder of three patents.