ACM-W, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Council on Women in Computing, today named Jennifer Widom of Stanford University as the 2015-2016 Athena Lecturer for pioneering foundations, architecture, and applications of database systems. Widom introduced active database systems, a major area of research in the database field today. Her work with semi-structured data has been extremely influential and has led to the popularization of XML and query languages for XML data. She has made contributions to streaming data management, data integrity, data lineage, and data accuracy and uncertainty.
The Athena Lecturer award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. It includes a $25,000 honorarium provided by Google Inc.
Widom earned her PhD in computer science from Cornell University. She is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where she currently also serves as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs in the School of Engineering.