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[Published originally in the May 2009 edition of Computing Research News, Vol. 21/No. 3]

CRA Elects Officers to Two-Year Terms

At its February 2009 meeting, the CRA board elected officers who will serve two-year terms. Peter Lee (Carnegie Mellon University) was elected Chair; Laura Haas (IBM Almaden Research Center) will serve as Vice Chair; and Susanne Hambrusch (Purdue University) was elected Secretary. Phil Bernstein (Microsoft Research) was re-elected CRA’s Treasurer.

Peter Lee is a Professor and the Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been a member of the CRA Board of Directors since 2005. During that time he was a key participant in developing the CCC proposal to NSF and currently serves on the CCC Council. Since 2007, he has chaired CRA’s Government Affairs Committee. Lee helped to establish CRA’s Education Committee in 2007, and has served on the Habermann Award Committee.

Professor Lee has a long history of service to various government advisory boards. He just recently completed a five-year term on the DARPA IXO Senior Advisory Group, and prior to that was a member of the Army Science Board. Today, Professor Lee serves as the Vice Chair of the DARPA ISAT committee and is a member of the National Academies' CSTB. He has served on study panels for the CSTB, the Defense Science Board, and Defense Threat Reduction Agency. From 2000-04, Professor Lee was Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and then served as the university's Vice Provost for Research before returning to the CS Department. He has been involved in initiatives related to women and minorities in CS; has served on the ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee; and was both Program Chair and Conference Chair for a number of major symposia. He is an ACM Fellow and has received a number of awards and honors for his research.

Peter Lee’s research interests include programming language design and implementation; compiler design; static program analysis; and certified code, especially proof-carrying code. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan with a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Laura Haas, Director of Computer Science at the IBM Almaden Research Center, joined the CRA board in 2007. She was a member of the Snowbird 2008 Planning Committee and currently serves on the Membership Committee.

Dr. Haas served as Vice Chair, ACM SIGMOD from 1989­97. Since 2000, she has been on the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees, currently serving as Vice-President (2004-09). In addition, she is a member of the Advisory Board, CIPRES Tree of Life Project (NSF ITR grant, 2004-09). Other activities include Program Chair, SIGMOD 1989, and IIS track, VLDB 2005; Industrial Program Chair, SIGMOD 2007; and General Co-Chair, VLDB 2008. Awards and honors include ACM Fellow (2006), IBM Corporate Award for Federated Database Technology (2002), IBM Distinguished Engineer (2002), ACM SIGMOD Outstanding Contribution Award (2000), and YWCA TWIN (Tribute to Women in Industry) Award (1991).

Dr. Haas’s research interests include: Information integration, information management (database management, content management, search), distributed systems, and scientific applications. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Susanne Hambrusch is Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University.

She joined the CRA Board in 2008. She has been an active member of CRA for a number of years, serving as a Member of the CRA-W Board, co-director of the CAPP and CMW workshops, and co-director of the CREU and MRO-W programs. She was a panelist on CRA’s New Department Chairs Workshop (Snowbird 2006); and at Snowbird 2008 she  co-chaired both a session on “Practical Solutions to a Continuing Problem: Sexual Harassment  and Gender Discrimination” and the New Department Chairs Workshop.

From 2002-07, Susanne Hambrusch was Head of the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. She is a member of the editorial board for Parallel Computing and Information Processing Letters, and she serves as a co-chair for CACM's Viewpoints section. Her research interests are in query management in high update database environments, data management and data dissemination in mobile and sensor environments, parallel and distributed computation, and analysis of algorithms. She also leads an interdisciplinary project on "Science Education in Computational Thinking," which develops a two-course sequence introducing science majors to computational thinking and the role of computation in scientific discovery. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University.

Philip A. Bernstein, a CRA Board Member since 2001, is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. He has been a member of the CRA Executive Committee since 2002, CRA’s Treasurer since 2003, and Chair of the Finance Committee since 2004. He served as Liaison to the Coalition to Diversify Computing from 2005-08, and was a Member of the CCC Nomination Committee. From 2002-03, he co-chaired the Industry-University Relations Committee, and was a committee member during 2003-04. He has served on the Industry, Elections, and Communications committees, and co-chaired Snowbird 2002.

Bernstein has been an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington since 1996, and has served on the Advisory Board at the University of Washington, Tacoma since 2003. He has served as a member of the National Academies Board on Mathematical Sciences and Applications since 2005; he has been a member of the ACM SIGMOD Advisory Board since 2006. He is an editor-in-chief of The TLDB Journal. On the SIGMOD Awards Committee, he was a member from 1998-2000, and Chair in 2001. From 2000-05, he was a Member of the Board of Trustees, VLDB Endowment. Honors and awards include: Member, National Academy of Engineering (2003); ACM Fellow (2001); and ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award (1994).

Dr. Bernstein’s research interests include database systems, meta-data management, and transaction processing. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto with a Ph.D. in Computer Science.