Magdalena Balazinska is the former Director of the eScience Institute (2017-2019) and a longstanding and current member of the eScience Executive Committee and a Senior Data Science Fellow. She was recently appointed as the next Director of the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science and Engineering. She is also a member of the Database, Data Science, and AstroDB groups at the UW, the director of the Integrative Graduate Education Research Traineeship (IGERT) PhD Program in Big Data and Data Science, and the co-founder of the Northwest Database Society (NWDS).

Magdalena’s research interests are in the field of database management systems. Her current research focuses on data management for data science, big data systems, and cloud computing.

Magdalena holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006). She is a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow (2007), and has received the inaugural VLDB Women in Database Research Award (2016), an ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award (2017), an NSF CAREER Award (2009), a ten year most influential paper award (2010), a Google Research Award (2011), an HP Labs Research Innovation Award (2009 and 2010), a Rogel Faculty Support Award (2006), a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship (2003 – 2005), and multiple best paper awards.