Boon Thau Loo

Boon Thau Loo is a Singaporean-American computer scientist, college administrator, and technology entrepreneur. He is the RCA professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania where he leads a research lab working on distributed systems, and is the Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Early life Boon Thau Loo was born in Malaysia and grew up in Singapore. where he received an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Following his studies there, he pursued his master's degree in computer science at Stanford University. In 2018, he became the associate dean of master's and professional programs, where he oversees the Master's and professional programs in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He has published over 150 papers and two books - Declarative Networking (Synthesis Lectures on Data Management) in 2012 and Datalog and Recursive Query Processing (Foundations and Trends(r) in Databases) in 2013. In 2019, Loo received the University of Pennsylvania Emerging Inventor of the Year award, given annually to one Penn faculty member for success in technology transfer. In July 2020, Loo was appointed Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, where he oversees the doctoral, master's and professional programs at Penn Engineering.

Business career While on sabbatical leave from Penn in 2014, Loo cofounded and led Gencore Systems, Gencore Systems was one of the first faculty-led startups from Penn's Computer Science department. The company raised seed funding in addition to a SBIR (Small Business Innovative Research) grant from the National Science Foundation. The company was later renamed Netsil and acquired by Nutanix in 2018 for up to 74 million US dollars in stock. In 2015, Loo also cofounded Termaxia, a big data storage company, where he served as Chief Scientist. In 2020, the company was acquired by Frontiir.

Recognition Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, awarded by the University of Pennsylvania, 2022 Best paper award at the 23rd International Conference on Extending Database Technology, 30 March-2 April 2020 Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award, 2012 ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award, 2007 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize, 2006 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Awards (Honorable mention), 1999