Héctor García-Molina

Héctor García-Molina (born 1954) is a Mexican/American computer scientist and Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was advisor to Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, from 1993 to 1997 when he was a computer science student at Stanford.

Born in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, García-Molina graduated in 1974 with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies (ITESM) and received both a master's degree in Electrical Engineering (1975) and a doctorate in Computer Science (1979) from Stanford University.

From 1979 to 1991, García-Molina worked as a professor of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University in New Jersey. In 1992 he joined the faculty of Stanford University as the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and has served as Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory (August 1994 – December 1997) and as chairman of the Computer Science Department from (January 2001 – December 2004). During 1994–1998, he was the Principal Investigator for the Stanford Digital Library Project, the project from which the Google search engine emerged.

García-Molina has served at the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997 to 2001, as chairman of the Computer Science Department of Stanford University from January 2001 to December 2004 and has been a member of Oracle Corporation's Board of Directors since October 2001.

García-Molina is also a Fellow member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is a Venture Advisor for Diamondhead Ventures and ONSET Ventures. In 1999 he was laureated with the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award.

• (2010) VLDB 10-year Best Paper Award for the paper entitled "The Evolution of the Web and Implications for an Incremental Crawler" in VLDB 2000.

• (2009) SIGMOD Best Demo Award for the demo entitled "CourseRank: A Social System for Course Planning".

• (2007) ICDE Influential Paper Award for the paper entitled "Disk Striping" in ICDE 1986. Citation: This early paper on disk striping significantly influenced subsequent work on RAID storage.

• (2007) Honorary doctorate from ETH Zurich. Citation: For his outstanding work in computer science.

• (1989) Hector was awarded the title of "World's fastest two-fingered typist" by the students in his CS119 class at Princeton University

• VLDB 2010. "Proceedings: Awards". Retrieved 2011-07-21. 
• Junghoo Cho; Hector Garcia-Molina (2000). The Evolution of the Web and Implications for an Incremental Crawler. VLDB. Cairo, Egypt. pp. 200–209. 
• Stanford InfoLab. "CourseRank". Retrieved 2011-07-21. 
• B. Bercovitz; F. Kaliszan; G. Koutrika; H. Liou; Z. Mohammadi Zadeh; H. Garcia-Molina (2009). CourseRank: A Social System for Course Planning. ACM SIGMOD. Providence, Rhode Island, USA. pp. 1107–1110. 
• IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering. "ICDE Influential Paper Awards". Retrieved 2011-07-21. 
• Kenneth Salem; Hector Garcia-Molina (1986). Disk Striping. IEEE ICDE. Los Angeles, California, USA. pp. 336–342. 
• Swiss Institute of Technology Zurich. "Ehrungen und Preise am ETH-Tag 2007" (in German). Retrieved 2008-03-10.