Héctor García-Molina (26 November 1954 – 25 November 2019) was a

Mexican-American Mexican Americans are Americans of full or partial Mexican descent. In 2022, Mexican Americans comprised 11.2% of the US population and 58.9% of all Hispanic and Latino Americans. In 2019, 71% of Mexican Americans were born in the United State ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. He was the advisor to

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 ...

co-founder

Sergey Brin Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on D ...

from 1993 to 1997 when Brin was a computer science student at Stanford.

Biography

Born in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, García-Molina graduated in 1974 with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the

Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM; ), also known as Technological Institute of Monterrey () or just Tec, is aresearch university based in Monterrey, Mexico, which has grown to include 35 campuses located across 25 cit ...

(ITESM) and received both a master's degree in Electrical Engineering (1975) and a doctorate in Computer Science (1979) from

. From 1979 to 1991, García-Molina worked as a professor of the Computer Science Department at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...

. In 1992 he joined the faculty of

as the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and has served as Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory (August 1994 – December 1997) and as chairman of the Computer Science Department from (January 2001 – December 2004). During 1994–1998, he was Principal Investigator for the Stanford Digital Library Project, the project from which the

search engine emerged. García-Molina served at the

U.S. President The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president directs the Federal government of the United States#Executive branch, executive branch of the Federal government of t ...

's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997 to 2001 and was a member of

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

's Board of Directors beginning in October 2001 until his death. García-Molina was also a Fellow member of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

, the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

and a member of the

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

. He was a Venture Advisor for Diamondhead Ventures and ONSET Ventures. In 1999 he was laureated with the ACM

SIGMOD SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems and databases. The annual ACM SIGMOD Conference, which began in 1975, is considered one of ...

Innovations Award. García-Molina died of cancer on the eve of his 65th birthday.

Awards

* (2010) VLDB 10-year Best Paper Award for the paper entitled "The Evolution of the Web and Implications for an Incremental Crawler" in VLDB 2000. * (2009) SIGMOD Best Demo Award for the demo entitled "CourseRank: A Social System for Course Planning". * (2007) ICDE Influential Paper Award for the paper entitled "Disk Striping" in ICDE 1986. This early paper on disk striping significantly influenced subsequent work on

RAID RAID (; redundant array of inexpensive disks or redundant array of independent disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical Computer data storage, data storage components into one or more logical units for th ...

storage. * (2007) Honorary doctorate from

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

for outstanding work in computer science.

References

External links

Héctor García-Molina's Personal Web page at Stanford University
(in Spanish)
→ On the Origins of GoogleVideolecture on Web Information Management: Past, Present and Future"Excelling Beyond the Spreadsheet" Presentation at the 2008 Yahoo! Research Big Thinkers Series
{{DEFAULTSORT:Garcia-Molina, Hector 1954 births 2019 deaths People from Monterrey Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education alumni Stanford University School of Engineering alumni Mexican computer scientists Mexican emigrants to the United States American computer scientists Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering faculty Stanford University School of Engineering faculty Princeton University faculty Oracle employees Database researchers 1997 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Google people Hispanic and Latino American scientists