Jennifer Widom

Jennifer Widom is the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the School of Engineering and the Fletcher Jones Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. She served as Chair of the Computer Science Department from 2009 to 2014 and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs in the School of Engineering from 2014 to 2016. Widom received her B.S. in Music with minors in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 1982, M.S. in Computer Science from Indiana University in 1983, M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1985, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1987. Prior to joining Stanford as Assistant Professor in 1993, she was a Research Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center from 1988 to 1993. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996, Professor in 2004, and Fletcher Jones Professor in 2008.

Her research spans nontraditional data management, including scalable graph processing, crowdsourcing and human-assisted computation, data provenance and lineage, managing uncertain data, and query processing on data streams. Widom has co-authored key textbooks such as A First Course in Database Systems (1997, 2002, 2008 editions), Database Systems: The Complete Book (2002, 2008 editions), Database System Implementation (2000), and Active Database Systems: Triggers and Rules for Advanced Database Processing (1996). Prominent publications include "Models and Issues in Data Stream Systems" (2002), "SimRank: A Measure of Structural-Context Similarity" (2002), "Understanding Workers, Developing Effective Tasks, and Enhancing Marketplace Dynamics: A Study of a Large Crowdsourcing Marketplace" (2017), and "Optimal Crowd-Powered Rating and Filtering Algorithms" (2014). She has earned major awards including membership in the National Academy of Engineering (2005) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009), ACM Fellowship (2005), Guggenheim Fellowship (2000-2001), ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award (2007), ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award (2015), and EPFL-WISH Erna Hamburger Prize (2018). Widom developed Stanford's early MOOCs on databases and released prototype software publicly, impacting commercial data management tools, and conducted global workshops during sabbaticals.

Professional Email: widom@stanford.edu