Faculty

Magdalena Balazinska is Professor, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair, and Director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Magdalena’s research interests are in the field of database management systems. Her current research focuses on data management for data science, big data systems, cloud computing, and image and video analytics.

Prior to her leadership of the Allen School, Magdalena was the Director of the eScience Institute, the Associate Vice Provost for Data Science, and the Director of the Advanced Data Science PhD Option. She also served as Co-Editor-in-Chief for Volume 13 of the Proceedings of the Very Large Data Bases Endowment (PVLDB) journal and as PC co-chair for the corresponding, prestigious VLDB’20 conference. Magdalena is an ACM Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006). Shortly after her arrival at the University of Washington, she was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow (2007). Magdalena received the inaugural VLDB Women in Database Research Award (2016) for her work on scalable distributed data systems. She also received an ACM SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award (2017) for her work on fault-tolerant distributed stream processing and a 10-year most influential paper award (2010) from her earlier work on reengineering software clones. Magdalena received an NSF CAREER Award (2009), the UW CSE ACM Teaching Award (2013), the Jean Loup Baer Career Development Professorship in Computer Science and Engineering (2014-2017), two Google Research Awards (2011 and 2018), an HP Labs Research Innovation Award (2009 and 2010), a Rogel Faculty Support Award (2006), a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship (2003-2005), and multiple best-paper (and “best of”) awards.