My research interests are in cloud databases, database physical design, and storage systems. I currently lead the Skyhook: programmable storage for databases project as part of the Center for Research on Open Source Software at UC Santa Cruz. Skyhook is an open source project that extends Ceph distributed object storage with customized data management functions. I also collaborate with the Systems Research Lab on the larger programmable storage effort. The Skyhook project is also part of Google Summer of Code 2019, where we mentor a student working on data formats for Skyhook.

I received my PhD in June 2014 from UC Santa Cruz Database group and subsequently joined Hewlett Packard Big Data R&D (Vertica database) where I worked on integrating Vertica with external analtyics engines such as Distributed-R and Apache Spark. At UC Santa Cruz my PhD advisor was Neoklis Polyzotis and my PhD thesis title is “Physical design tuning methods for emerging system architectures”. My thesis ( abstract) introduces new physical design methods for databases in the cloud. Specifically I address RDBMS, Hadoop, and hybrid ‘multistore’ (combined RDBMS + Hadoop co-processing) system architectures.

Previously, I received my MS from the University of California, San Diego in the Systems and Networking Group. My MS advisor was Walt Burkhard and my MS thesis title is “Improving disk array performance and reliability”, which introduces a data layout and scheduling policy for RAID arrays. I received a BS in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of South Florida, where I did research on unique encodings for DNA languages. During graduate school I spent several summers at NEC Labs working on CloudDB in the Data Management group, at Google in the Platforms Storage group, and at Teradata in the Virtual Storage Architecture group.