Margo Seltzer


Margo Ilene Seltzer is a professor and researcher in computer systems. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, she was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society.

Education

In 1982, Seltzer was a teaching assistant under Harry R. Lewis at Harvard University. In 1983, she received her A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College, and in 1992, her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where her dissertation, "File System Performance and Transaction Support", was supervised by Michael Stonebraker. Her work in log-structured file systems, databases, and wide-scale caching is especially well known, and she was lead author of the BSD-LFS paper.

Career

Academia

Seltzer became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard in 1992 and an Associate Professor in 1997, and was named Gordon McKay Professor in 2000; in 2004 she became the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science. From 2005 to 2010 she was designated a Harvard College Professor in recognition of "particularly distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching", and from 2002 to 2006 was Associate Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She was an advisor to the Harvard Undergraduate Women in Computer Science.
In September 2018, she joined the faculty at the University of British Columbia Department of Computer Science as the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science.

Business

Seltzer was Chief Technical Officer of Sleepycat Software from 1996 until Sleepycat was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2006. She served as an architect on the Oracle Berkeley DB team for several years before transferring to Oracle Labs where she continues to act as an architect.
Seltzer was a director of USENIX from 2005 to 2014, serving as vice president for one year and president for two.
In 2019, she received the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, the award citing both her seminal academic work on BerkeleyDB and provenance systems and her dedication to the USENIX community at large.
In 2011 she was made a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery the Association's highest member grade, in recognition of "outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community."

Personal life

She is married to software developer Keith Bostic.