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Spring 2024 office hours: Thursday 2-3pm via OHQ (Zoom). Read announcements within OHQ on any date/time changes. Pennkey authentication required.

Academic biography: Boon Thau Loo currently the RCA Professor at the Computer and Information Science department with a secondary appointment in Electrical and Systems Engineering. He lead the NetDB@Penn research group, is the director of the distributed systems lab, and a member of the database group. 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), Ruth and Joel Spira award for Excellence in Teaching (2021), and the University Lindback award for distinguished teaching (2022). He has graduated 16 Ph.D. students including five winners of dissertation awards. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 2006. Prior to his Ph.D, he received my M.S. degree from Stanford University in 2000, and his B.S. degree with highest honors from University of California-Berkeley in 1999. He was awarded the 2006 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for the most outstanding dissertation research in the Department of EECS at University of California-Berkeley, and the 2007 ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award.

Administrative biography: Boon Thau Loo is the Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, where he oversee academic and admissions operations in all doctoral, master's and professional programs at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, including Penn Engineering Online. As Associate Dean, he has launched several new initiatives, including launching the Penn Engineering Online office, the accelerated master’s program, annual graduate students awards, Dean's doctoral scholarship, Dean’s master’s fellowship for under-resourced students, Dean's Bridge-to-Ph.D. master's fellowship, MCIT Online (first Ivy League fully online master’s degree program in computer science for non-computer science majors), MSE-DS Online (online master's in data science), lifelong learning for alums, school-wide professional development course for master's students, and semester-long academic field studies for master's students.

Entrepreneurship biography: As an entrepreneur, Boon Thau Loo co-founded two technology companies that were acquired successfully. In 2015, he co-founded Termaxia, a software-defined energy-efficient big data storage startup based in Philadelphia. The company was successfully acquired in 2020 by Frontiir, one of the fastest growing technology companies in Southeast-Asia. He currently serve as Frontiir's executive advisor to the CEO and CTO. Previously, he co-founded and led Gencore Systems (Netsil) in 2014, a cloud performance analytics company that spun out of his research team, commercializing his research group's work on the Scalanytics declarative network analytics platform. The company was acquired in 2018 by Nutanix Inc, a public cloud infrastructure company. The company was one of the first faculty-led startups from Penn Engineering's CIS department, and at the point of acquisition, one of the first successful faculty-led startup exit from Penn's engineering school.