Laura Haas

Prior to joining UMass Amherst, Haas spent 36 years at IBM, where she was rose to the level of IBM Fellow.  Within IBM, she most recently served as Director of the Accelerated Discovery Lab (2011-2017); she was Director of Computer Science at IBM's Almaden research center from 2005 to 2011, and had worldwide responsibility for IBM Research's exploratory science program from 2009 through 2013. From 2001 to 2005, she led the Information Integration Solutions architecture and development teams in IBM's Software Group.  Before that, Haas was a research staff member and manager at IBM Research – Almaden. She spent a sabbatical year at University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1992-93, and a shorter sabbatical at ETH Zurich in 2009; AB, Harvard, 1978; PhD, University of Texas at  Austin, 1981.

Dr. Haas' research explores the integration of diverse types of data in the service of accelerating new discoveries from data. She is best known for her work on the Starburst query processor, from which IBM's DB2 LUW extended relational database system was developed; on Garlic, a federated system allowing easy integration of heterogeneous data sources; and on Clio, the first semi-automatic tool for heterogeneous schema mapping.  Most recently, she founded IBM Research's Accelerated Discovery Lab, a unique environment dedicated to (1) enabling research in and improvements to the tools and systems that facilitate analysis of data, and (2) enabling the business person or domain expert to focus on their investigation instead of the systems and data challenges.

At IBM, Haas received several awards for Outstanding Innovation and Technical Achievement and an IBM Corporate Award for information integration technology, and was named an IBM Fellow. She is a recipient of the Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award, and the ACM SIGMOD Codd Innovation Award.  Haas was vice president of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees from 2004 to 2009, and served on the board of the Computing Research Association from 2007 to 2016 (vice chair 2009-2015); she currently serves on the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (2013-2019). She is an ACM Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.