Patricia Selinger is an American computer scientist

Computer scientist

A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

 and IBM Fellow

IBM Fellow

An IBM Fellow is an appointed position at IBM made by IBM’s CEO. Typically only 4 to 9 IBM Fellows are appointed each year, at the annual Corporate Technical Recognition Event in May or June. It is the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve.The IBM Fellows program...

, best known for her work on relational database management systems. She played a fundamental role in the development of System R

System R

IBM System R is a database system built as a research project at IBM San Jose Research in the 1970s. System R was a seminal project: it was a precursor of SQL, which has since become the standard relational data query language...

, a pioneering relational database implementation, and wrote the canonical paper on relational query optimization

Query optimization

Query optimization is a function of many relational database management systems in which multiple query plans for satisfying a query are examined and a good query plan is identified. This may or not be the absolute best strategy because there are many ways of doing plans. There is a trade-off...

. The dynamic programming algorithm for determining join order proposed in that paper still forms the basis for most of the query optimizers used in modern relational systems.

She was made an IBM Fellow in 1994, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering

National Academy of Engineering

The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...

 in 1999, and won the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award

SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award

The ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award is a lifetime research achievement award given by the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data, at its yearly flagship conference...

 in 2002. Before her retirement, she was the Vice President of Data Management Architecture and Technology at IBM. She received A.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics

Applied mathematics

Applied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge...

 from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 (2009).

External links

• IBM Women in Technology Profile
• Database Dialogue with Pat Selinger, an interview conducted by James Hamilton and published in the Communications of the ACM
  Communications of the ACM
  Communications of the ACM is the flagship monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery . First published in 1957, CACM is sent to all ACM members, currently numbering about 80,000. The articles are intended for readers with backgrounds in all areas of computer science and information...