Campus Directory

Division Baskin School of Engineering

Department/College/Unit Computer Science and Engineering

Title Distinguished Research Professor and Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Emeriti

Web Site

Primary Office Location Engineering Building 2
Room 345A

Mail Stop SOE3

Biography, Education and Training

• Phokion Kolaitis is a Distinguished Resarch Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and a Principal Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He served as Chair of the Computer Science Department at UC Santa Cruz from 1997 to 2001, and during 2014-15. From June 2004 to September 2008, he served as Senior Manager of the Computer Science Principles and Methodologies Department at the IBM Almaden Research Center (and while on leave of absence from UC Santa Cruz). Kolaitis is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, a Foreign Member of Academia Europea, and the recipient of a 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also the recipient of two IBM Research Division Outstanding Innovation Awards, an IBM Research Division Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, a co-winner of the 2013 ICDT Test-of-Time Award, a co-winner of both the 2008 and the 2014 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award, and a co-winner of the 2020 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation.  In 2014, Kolaitis was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree (Doctor Honoris Causa) from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Research Interests

• Principles of database systems
• Logic in computer science
• Computational complexity