Margo Ilene Seltzer is a professor and researcher in computer systems. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...

. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society.

Education

HarryRLewis Harvard AppliedSciences11 TeachingFellows Halloween1982

Seltzer received her A.B. in Applied Mathematics at Harvard/ Radcliffe College in 1983, where she was teaching assistant under Harry R. Lewis at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. In 1992, she received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

where her dissertation, "File System Performance and Transaction Support", was supervised by

Michael Stonebraker Michael Ralph Stonebraker (born October 11, 1943) is a computer scientist specializing in database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational databa ...

. Her work in

log-structured file system A log-structured filesystem is a file system in which data and metadata are written sequentially to a circular buffer, called a log. The design was first proposed in 1988 by John K. Ousterhout and Fred Douglis and first implemented in 1992 by ...

s, databases, and wide-scale caching is especially well-known, and she was lead author of the BSD-LFS paper.

Career

Academia

Seltzer became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at

in 1992, and an Associate Professor in 1997. She held endowed chairs as a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in 2000, and as the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science in 2004. From 2005 to 2010, Seltzer was designated a Harvard College Professor in recognition of "particularly distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching." Seltzer was the Associate Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from 2002 to 2006, and an advisor to the Harvard Undergraduate Women in Computer Science. In September 2018, Seltzer joined the faculty at the

Department of Computer Science as the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science. In February 2019, she was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

Business

Seltzer was Chief Technical Officer of

Sleepycat Software Sleepycat Software, Inc. was the software company primarily responsible for maintaining the Berkeley DB packages from 1996 to 2006. Berkeley DB is freely-licensed database software originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley f ...

(developers of the

Berkeley DB Berkeley DB (BDB) is an unmaintained embedded database software library for key/value data, historically significant in open source software. Berkeley DB is written in C with API bindings for many other programming languages. BDB stores arbitr ...

embedded database) from 1996 to 2006, when the company was acquired by Oracle Corporation. She served as an architect on the Oracle Berkeley DB team for several years before transferring to Oracle Labs where she continues to act as an architect. Seltzer was a director of USENIX from 2005 to 2014, serving as vice president for one year and president for two. In 2019, she received the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award for her seminal work on BerkeleyDB and provenance systems and her dedication to the USENIX community at large. In 2011, Seltzer was made a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (the Association's highest member grade) in recognition of "outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community." In July 2020, Seltzer accepted the SIGMOD Software Systems award on behalf of the Sleepycat Software team.

Personal life

She is married to software developer Keith Bostic.

References

External links

* *http://mis-misinformation.blogspot.com/
Appreciation of Margo Seltzer
for Ada Lovelace Day by

Aaron Swartz Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. A prolific programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS, the tech ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Seltzer, Margo Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American computer scientists American women computer scientists University of California, Berkeley alumni Harvard University faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Radcliffe College alumni American chief technology officers Women chief technology officers University of British Columbia faculty American women academics 21st-century American women