Margo Seltzer awarded Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award

Margo Seltzer, '83, the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been awarded the Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award by the Education Committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA-E).

Seltzer, who directs the Center for Research on Computation and Society at SEAS, is one of three awardees being recognized for their “exceptional mentorship” and providing undergraduate research opportunities.

Seltzer has mentored dozens of undergraduate students over her career, many of whom have pursued computing graduate studies. She includes undergraduates as full-fledged members of her research team and is a faculty adviser for the Harvard Women in Computer Science student organization.  

In 2010, Seltzer received the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising from SEAS. She is an ACM Fellow, a Sloan Foundation Fellow in computer science, and has won numerous awards for mentoring and teaching. She is a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies, and a past president of the USENIX Association.

Seltzer’s research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing data provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, new architectures for parallelizing execution, and systems that apply technology to problems in healthcare.