Nesime Tatbul is a senior staff research scientist at Intel’s Parallel Computing Lab. Since 2013, she has been based at MIT CSAIL, overseeing Intel’s MIT university research programs on data systems, programming systems, and AI, including the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data, Data Systems and AI Lab (DSAIL), and the Intel/NSF Center on Machine Programming. Previously, she served on the computer science faculty of ETH Zurich in Switzerland, after receiving her PhD and MS degrees in Computer Science from Brown University in USA and her MS and BS degrees in Computer Engineering from the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Turkey.
Her research interests are broadly in large-scale data management systems and modern data-intensive applications, with a recent focus on learned data systems, time series analytics, and observability data management. She is most known for her contributions to stream processing, which include the Aurora/Borealis Systems (now TIBCO StreamBase) and the S-Store System (the first streaming OLTP system).
She published more than 100 papers in top-tier venues, which received around 13,000 citations (as of February 2025). Nesime is the recipient of a PVLDB Distinguished Associate Editor Award (2023) and an IBM Faculty Award (2008), and a co-recipient of a CIDR Test of Time Award (2025, for “Borealis (CIDR 2005) inspired new functionality in streaming systems and led the architectural thinking that significantly influenced academia as well as the industry”), an ACM SIGMOD Research Highlights Award (2022, top-10 database articles of the year, for “Bao (SIGMOD 2021), a significant step forward for query optimization that combines traditional wisdom with neural networks”), an ACM SIGMOD Best Paper Award (2021, Data Management Research Track), two ACM SIGMOD Best Demonstration Awards (2019 and 2005), and an ACM DEBS Grand Challenge Award (2011).
Nesime has served on the organization and program committees for various conferences and workshops in her field, including: ACM SIGMOD (associate editor in 2011, 2022, and 2024; industrial co-chair in 2014; panels co-chair in 2023), VLDB (demo co-chair in 2019; workshops co-chair in 2020; scalable data science category inaugural co-chair in 2021; associate editor in 2021, 2023, and 2024; industrial co-chair in 2024, program co-chair in 2025), IEEE ICDE (area chair in 2013; industrial co-chair in 2023), ACM DEBS (program co-chair in 2021), CIDR (program co-chair in 2026-2028), SIGMOD/aiDM (program co-chair in 2020 and 2021), SIGMOD/DaMoN (program co-chair in 2023 and 2024), NeurIPS, and NeurIPS/WiML (area chair and mentor in 2019-2022), and on the editorial boards of the ACM SIGMOD Record (2012-2017) and the VLDB Journal (associate editor in 2019-2023, editor-in-chief for Americas since 2023) and on the advisory board of the PVLDB (since 2023).
She is an elected member of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees since 2020, and an IEEE Senior Member. In 2023, she was named an ACM Distinguished Member for “foundational scientific contributions in streaming data systems and time series analytics.”