Jeffrey A. Dean

College of Science and Engineering, November 7, 2013

Jeffrey A. Dean received a bachelor of science degree in computer science and economics in the College of Science and Engineering in 1990 at the University of Minnesota. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington (1996). Currently, he is a Google Fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group. He joined Google in 1999 and has become the “technical face” of Google. Dean is credited with the design and implementation of MapReduce, a system for simplifying the development of large- scale data processing applications and Bigtable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system used underneath a number of Google products. Before joining Google, Dean worked at the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS, where he developed software to model the impact of the AIDS pandemic. Because of the significant contributions to the field of computer science, Dean has received numerous prestigious awards including the Association for Computing Machinery (AMC) Fellow, election to the National Academy for Engineering, and the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award in recognition of “demonstrated creativity and innovation in operating systems research.” He has also received best paper awards at OSDI, the top systems conference in computer science. Dean was given a University of Minnesota CSE Distinguished Alumni Award in 2007.