Margo I. Seltzer

Margo Ilene Seltzer, currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems at the University of British Columbia, has fundamentally transformed computer science through her groundbreaking work in database systems and file storage. After earning her A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Radcliffe College in 1983 and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1992, she became Harvard's Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science, where she made history as one of the institution's most distinguished faculty members. As co-founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, she developed Berkeley DB, a revolutionary database system that earned the 2020 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award. Her research spans systems architecture, data provenance, and healthcare technology applications, with over 100 published papers. Her exceptional teaching has earned numerous accolades, including the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award, the Abrahmson Teaching Award, and the CRA-E Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and Fellow of the ACM, Seltzer continues to influence both academia and industry through her roles at Oracle Corporation and her leadership in organizations like USENIX, where she served as president and received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.