Val Tannen

Val Tannen is a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science of the University of Pennsylvania. He joined Penn after receiving his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. After working for a time in Programming Languages, his current research interests are in Databases. Moreover, he has always been interested in applications of Logic to Computer Science. Since 1994 he has also worked in Bioinformatics. He is one of the co-founders of the Center for Bioinformatics of the University of Pennsylvania and a former member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Penn Genomic Frontiers Institute. He has served as the Database Lead of the NSF CIPRES Project which includes TreeBASE II development, he led the NSF pPOD Project which is concerned with data management infrastructure for the NSF AToL ``Assembling the Tree of Life'' projects. In addition he was a computational science community leader for the NSF iPlant Collaborative's Plant Tree of Life project (iPToL). In Databases, he and his students and collaborators have worked on query language design and on models and systems for query optimization, parallel query processing, and data integration. More recently their work has focused on models and systems for data sharing, data provenance, the management of uncertain information and algorithmic provisioning for what-if analysis. Tannen has received the 20 year Test-of-Time Award from ICDT and the 10 year Test-of-Time Award from PODS. He is an ACM Fellow.