Dr. Laura Haas joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst in August 2017 as Dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences, after a long career at IBM, where she was accorded the title IBM Fellow in recognition of her impact.
At the time of her retirement from IBM, she was Director of IBM Research’s Accelerated Discovery Lab (2011-2017), after serving as Director of Computer Science at IBM’s Almaden Research Center from 2005 to 2011. She had worldwide responsibility for IBM Research’s exploratory science program from 2009 through 2013. From 2001-2005, she led the Information Integration Solutions architecture and development teams in IBM's Software Group.
Previously, Dr. Haas was a research staff member and manager at Almaden. She is best known for her work on the Starburst query processor, from which DB2 LUW was developed, on Garlic, a system which allowed integration of heterogeneous data sources, and on Clio, the first semi-automatic tool for heterogeneous schema mapping. She has received several IBM awards for Outstanding Innovation and Technical Achievement, an IBM Corporate Award for information integration technology, the Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award, and the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovation Award.
Dr. Haas was Vice President of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees from 2004-2009 and served on the board of the Computing Research Association from 2007-2016 (vice chair 2009-2015); she currently serves on the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (2013-2019). She is an ACM Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
