Héctor García-Molina


Héctor García-Molina was a Mexican/American computer scientist and Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was advisor to Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, from 1993 to 1997 when he 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 and received both a master's degree in Electrical Engineering and a doctorate in Computer Science from Stanford University.
From 1979 to 1991, García-Molina worked as a professor of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University in New Jersey. In 1992 he joined the faculty of Stanford University 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 and as chairman of the Computer Science Department from. During 1994–1998, he was the Principal Investigator for the Stanford Digital Library Project, the project from which the Google search engine emerged.
García-Molina has served at the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 to 2001 and has been a member of Oracle Corporation's Board of Directors since October 2001.
García-Molina was also a Fellow member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was a Venture Advisor for Diamondhead Ventures and ONSET Ventures. In 1999 he was laureated with the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award.

Awards