Jignesh M. Patel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. He graduated with a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1998. As a graduate student, he led the efforts to develop the Paradise database system, a parallel object-relational database system, which is currently being commercialized at NCR Corp. Since 1999, he has been a faculty member in the EECS department at the University of Michigan, where his research has focused on bioinformatics, spatial query processing, XML query processing, and interactions between DBMSs and processor architectures. He is the recipient of a 2001 NSF Career Award, and IBM Faculty Awards in the years 2001 and 2003. He has served on a number of Program Committees including ACM SIGMOD and VLDB. He is currently the Associate Editor for the Systems and Prototype section of ACM SIGMOD Record, and a Vice-Chair for IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, 2005.