Aaron J. Elmore is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and the College of the University of Chicago. Aaron was previously a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT working with Mike Stonebraker on elastic and multitenant database systems, and Sam Madden on the DataHub project. Aaron's thesis on Elasticity Primitives for Database-as-a-Service was completed at the University of California, Santa Barbara under the supervision of Divy Agrawal and Amr El Abbadi. Prior to receiving a PhD, Aaron spent several years in industry and completed an MS at the University of Chicago. His recent research interests focus on building data systems that address the growing data deluge. This includes building a resource-efficent database system (CrocodileDB), new compression techniques for databases (DenseStore and EdgeTSD), bringing git-like functionality to Databases (Datahub, Decible, and OrpheusDB), and data discovery (DataSwamp and Relic). His previous projects included seminal work on polystores (BigDAWG), elastic databases (E-Store), and database migration (Squall and Zephyr).
For OrpheusDB: Bolt-on Versioning for Relational Databases, In best 5 papers.
Jun Hyuk Chang
Riki Otaki
Rui Liu (w/Franklin). Postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley
Suhail Rehman. Assistant Instructional Professor University of Chicago
John Paparrizos (Postdoc w/Franklin). Ohio State University
Chunwei Liu. Postdoc at MIT
Will Brackenbury (w/Blase Ur). VetCove
Zechao Shang (Postdoc w/Franklin). Snowflake
Dixin Tang. Postdoc at UC Berkeley. Now at UT Austin.
Hao Jiang. Postdoc at Harvard. Now at Databricks
Dr. Rui Lui has received his PhD and joins Lawrence Berkeley lab as a postdoctoral scholar.
Prof. Dixin Tang joins Univ. Texas at Austin as a Assistant Professor.
Prof. Suhail Rehman has received his PhD and joins UChicago as a Assistant Instructional Professor.
Chunwei Liu has received his PhD and joins MIT DSAIL as a Postdoc.
Postdoc Dr. John Paparrizos (co-advised with Mike Franklin) joins the Ohio State University as an Assistant Professor.
Will Brackenbury (co-advised with Blase Ur) has received his PhD and joins PetCove.
The University of Chicago has approved Aaron's tenure and promotion to Associate Professor effective June 2022. Link to article.
Aaron receives the NSF early career award. Link to award.
Hao Jiang has received his PhD and joined as a postdoc with Stratos Idreos at Harvard.
Dixin Tang has received his PhD and joined as a postdoc with Aditya Parameswaran at UC Berkeley.
Postdoc Dr. Zechao Shang (co-advised with Mike Franklin) joins Snowflake.
Aaron joined as an associate editor for SIGMOD Record
Aaron is Publicity chair for VLDB 2021.
Raul Castro Fernandez joins Univ. of Chicago
Aaron is a mentor for a NSF REU site on Big Data.
Aaron joins the technical advisory board for Ocient.
Sanjay Krishnan joins Univ. of Chicago!
Aaron and Alvin Cheung co-chair the innagrual SIGMOD student research competition.
Aaron joins the technical advisory board for 3PM Solutions.
Aaron and Alvin Cheung are the proceedings editors for PVLDB.
Aaron and Jennie Rogers co-chair the SIGMOD Demo Track.
Mike Franklin joins Univ. of Chicago!
Aaron joined Univ. of Chicago
I frequently work with undergraduate students who have either taken (and done well) in my Intro to Database course, or students who were accepted to the NSF REU site on Big Data.
If the course has not begun, please sign up for the centralized waitlist managed by the department. If the course has already started, and you were on the waitlist there is usually a chance you will get in the class if you are a 4th year student. On occasion a 3rd year student will be added. If you were not on the centralized waitlist I will not add you to the class.
For the academic year 2025-2026 I am NOT looking for any new students.
On rare occasion I do write letters for students who did exceptional in class. However, honestly for me to be able to write a strong letter it is extremely helpful to have worked together on research, a practicum, or related project. Good letters need details and it can be hard without significant interactions. If you are interested in graduate school please reach out for research opportunities after taking Intro to DB.