Donald Kossmann is the director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond, USA. Before that, he was professor in the Systems Group of the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich for 13 years, doing research and teaching all flavors of databases and data management systems. He was chair of ACM SIGMOD from 2013 to 2017 and served on the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment from 2005 to 2011. He is a co-founder of four start-ups.

Sarayu Sundar, Ph.D.
Dr. Sarayu Sundar serves as a Higher Education Research Associate with the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) at the University of Colorado