Boon Thau Loo is the RCA Professor in the Computer and Information Science (CIS) department at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a secondary appointment in the Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) department. He is also the Senior Associate Dean for Education and Global Initiatives, overseeing all doctoral and professional master’s programs, non-degree programs, international engagements, professional development, and engineering entrepreneurship at Penn Engineering. He leads the NetDB@Penn research team and was the director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL) from 2019-2024, an interdisciplinary systems research lab bringing together researchers in networking, distributed systems, and security. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 2006. Before his Ph.D., he received his M.S. degree from Stanford University in 2000 and his B.S. degree with highest honors from the University of California-Berkeley in 1999. His research focuses on distributed data management systems, Internet-scale query processing, and applying data-centric techniques and formal methods to the design, analysis, and implementation of networked systems. He was awarded the 2006 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for the most outstanding dissertation research in the Department of EECS at the University of California-Berkeley and the 2007 ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2009), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award (2012), Penn’s Emerging Inventor of the Year award (2018), the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching (2021), the University Lindback award for distinguished teaching (2022), and the International Student Advocate of the Year (ISAY) (2024) awarded by Penn ISSS. He has published 170+ peer-reviewed publications and has graduated sixteen Ph.D. students and three postdocs. His graduated doctoral students and postdocs include three tenured professors, four current tenure-track professors, and winners of five dissertation awards.
Loo has launched several new initiatives, including launching the Penn Engineering Online office, the accelerated master’s program, annual graduate students awards, Dean’s Doctoral Fellowship, Dean’s master’s fellowship, the bridge-to-Ph.D. master’s fellowships for under-resourced minority students, MCIT Online (first Ivy League fully online master’s degree program in computer science for non-computer science majors), MSE-DS (online data science master’s program), MSE-AI (online artificial intelligence master’s program), lifelong learning for alums via Penn Engineering online, school-wide professional development course for master’s students, and semester-long academic field studies for master’s students.
In addition to his academic work, he actively participates in entrepreneurial activities and has co-founded two technology companies that were successfully acquired. He was the co-founder and Chief Scientist at Termaxia, a software-defined energy-efficient big data storage startup in Philadelphia that he started in 2015. Termaxia was acquired five years later, in 2020, by Frontiir, one of the fastest-growing technology companies in Southeast Asia. He currently serves as Frontiir’s executive advisor to the CEO and CTO. Before Termaxia, he was the founding CEO of Gencore Systems (Netsil) in 2014, a cloud microservices analytics company that spun out of his research team at Penn, commercializing his research on the Scalanytics declarative analytics platform. The company was acquired by a public cloud company, Nutanix Inc., in 2018. He has also published several papers with industry partners (e.g., AT&T, HP Labs, Intel, Microsoft, Perspecta Labs, Raytheon BBN), applying research on real-world systems that result in production deployment and patents.