Anastasia Ailamaki wins Nemitsas Prize

Anastasia Ailamaki Professor and Director at EPFL’s Data-Intensive Applications and Systems Laboratory, is the laureate of the Nemitsas Prize in Computer Science. 

The Cyprus President, Mr. Nikos Anastasiades presented the award to Professor Ailamaki during a prestigious ceremony held at the presidential palace. Professor Ailamaki was honored for her numerous seminal contributions at the intersection of computer architecture and database systems, showing how the design of modern processors impacts the performance of database systems.

“In my 20 years working as a data management professor, I have been blessed to work with brilliant students and scientific collaborators”, said Anastasia Ailamaki during her acceptance speech. “I am grateful to the many people in my life who supported me in pursuing my crazy dreams, to Cyprus where I was born and to Greece where I grew up, and to the Nemitsas Foundation for supporting me and honoring me with this award.”

The Nemitsas Foundation was established in 2009 to acknowledge and award Cypriot scientists who excel in their specialty either in Cyprus or abroad. This year, the selected stream was Computer Science.

This award is an important addition to Professor Ailamaki’s long list of distinctions, which include:

• an ERC Consolidator Award (2013)
• a Finmeccanica endowed chair from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon (2007)
• a European Young Investigator Award from the European Science Foundation (2007)
• an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2005)
• an NSF CAREER Award (2002)
• and ten best-paper awards in scientific conferences.