Laura Haas is an IBM Fellow. She has been Director of Computer Science at IBM's Almaden Research Center since 2005, and leads research in computer science across IBM's eight worldwide research labs. From 2001-2005, she led the Information Integration Solutions architecture and development teams in IBM's Software Group. Previously, Dr. Haas was a research staff member and manager at Almaden. She is best known for her work on the Starburst query processor (from which DB2 LUW was developed), on Garlic, a system which allowed integration of heterogeneous data sources, and on Clio, the first semi-automatic tool for heterogeneous schema mapping. She has received several IBM awards for Outstanding Technical Achievement, and an IBM Corporate Award for her work on information integration technology. Dr. Haas was Vice President of the VLDB Board of Trustees from 2004-2009, and is currently a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, an ACM Fellow, and Vice President of the board of the Computing Research Association.