Phil Bernstein

Phil Bernstein is a Distinguished Scientist in the Data Systems Group at Microsoft Research Redmond and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington where he occasionally teaches CSEP 545 Transaction Processing. With over four decades of pioneering work in database systems, he has made significant contributions across transaction processing, data integration, and distributed systems.

His research interests focus on database systems, transaction processing, and data integration, with recent work on approximate nearest neighbor search over vector databases, improving database servers using disaggregated cloud resources, and the Orleans distributed systems programming framework. Bernstein's work on Orleans (2012-2019) resulted in an open-source framework widely used inside and outside Microsoft, with components addressing indexing, geo-distribution, and transactions.

Bernstein has received numerous prestigious awards including being named a Fellow of the ACM and AAAS, receiving the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, and election to the National Academy of Engineering and Washington State Academy of Sciences.

• Fellow of the ACM
• Fellow of the AAAS
• SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award
• Member of the National Academy of Engineering
• Member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences

As an active researcher and academic, Bernstein serves on numerous conference program committees including SIGMOD 2024 (keynotes), VLDB 2024 (Industry), and has held editorial positions for Information Systems and Springer Data-Centric Systems and Applications. His influential books, Principles of Transaction Processing (2009) and Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems, remain foundational texts in the field.