Shahram Ghandeharizadeh received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1990. Since then, he has been on the faculty at the University of Southern California where he is the director of the Database Laboratory. He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his research and teaching including the National Science Foundation Young Investigator’s Award, USC School of Engineering Research and Outstanding Teaching Awards,and the ACM Software System Award. He has published more than a hundred articles and organized numerous conferences. He is the co-inventor of the BG benchmark and the founder of Mitra, a startup commercializing a high performance cache-augmented data store named KOSAR.