Fatma Özcan is a Turkish-American computer scientist who works as a principal

software engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

for

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, where her work concerns infrastructure such as

MapReduce MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel and distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filte ...

for the analysis of

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

Education and career

Özcan has an undergraduate degree from

Middle East Technical University Middle East Technical University (commonly referred to as METU; in Turkish language, Turkish, ''Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi'', ODTÜ) is a prestigious public university, public Institute of technology, technical university located in Ankara, ...

Ankara Ankara is the capital city of Turkey and List of national capitals by area, the largest capital by area in the world. Located in the Central Anatolia Region, central part of Anatolia, the city has a population of 5,290,822 in its urban center ( ...

. She completed her Ph.D. in 2001 at the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD i ...

, with the dissertation ''Improving the performance of heterogeneous databases and agents'', supervised by V. S. Subrahmanian. On completing her Ph.D., Özcan joined the

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American Multinational corporation, multinational information technology company. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York ...

Almaden Research Center in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially the City of San José ( ; ), is a cultural, commercial, and political center within Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. With a city population of 997,368 and a metropolitan area population of 1.95 million, it is ...

, where her first project involved integrating

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

with the IBM Db2 database, a feature that later became known as

pureXML pureXML is the native XML storage feature in the IBM Db2 data server. pureXML provides query languages, storage technologies, indexing technologies, and other features to support XML data. The word ''pure'' in pureXML was chosen to indicate that ...

. She moved from IBM to Google in 2020.

Recognition

Özcan received the 2022 VLDB Women in Database Research Award of the Very Large Data Bases Endowment, given "for two decades of research in query languages and query processing, and her development of new technologies that have had significant impact on widely-used data management products". She was named as an

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

, in the 2024 class of fellows, "for contributions to the field of scalable data management systems".

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Ozcan, Fatma Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Turkish emigrants to the United States Turkish computer scientists American software engineers American women computer scientists Database researchers Middle East Technical University alumni University of Maryland, College Park alumni IBM Research computer scientists Google employees 2024 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery