Michael Stonebraker is an adjunct professor at MIT CSAIL and a database pioneer who specializes in database management systems and data integration. He was awarded the 2014 A.M. Turing Award (known as the “Nobel Prize of computing”) by the Association for Computing Machinery for his “fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems as well as their practical application through nine start-up companies that he has founded.”
Professor Stonebraker has been a pioneer of database research and technology for more than 40 years, and is the author of scores of papers in this area. Before joining CSAIL in 2001, he was a professor of computer science at the University of California Berkeley for 29 years. While at Berkeley, he was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS; the object-relational DBMS POSTGRES; and the federated data system Mariposa. After joining MIT, he was the principal architect of C-Store (a column store commercialized by Vertica), H-Store, a main memory OLTP engine (commercialized by VoltDB), and SciDB (an array engine commercialized by Paradigm4). In addition, he has started three other companies in the “Big Data” space, including Tamr, oriented toward scalable data integration. He also co-founded the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data, based at MIT CSAIL.