Alkis Simitsis is a Research Director at Athena Research Center. In the past, he held positions with HP/HPE Labs, Micro Focus, Unravel Data, and IBM Research, including Chief Scientist, Systems Architect, and Principal Research Scientist.
Alkis brings over 20 years of experience across both startup and corporate environments, developing innovative information and data management solutions as well as enterprise-grade products. His work spans scalable big data infrastructure, data-intensive analytics, information management, business intelligence, massively parallel processing, distributed and column-store databases, graph databases, security analytics, and cloud computing.
Alkis holds 45 U.S. and 1 European patents, and has published 130+ papers in refereed international journals and conferences (top publications cited 8000+ times, h-index: 47), and frequently serves in the organization and program committees of top-tier international scientific conferences. His most recent service includes General co-chair for VLDB 2027, PC co-chair for IEEE ICDE 2026 and EDBT 2025, associate editor for ACM SIGMOD 2027/2026, PVLDB 2026/2025/2023, IEEE ICDE 2027/2023, and IEEE TKDE, and he is on the editorial board of ACM/IMS J. of Data Science, VLDB Journal, and Elsevier DKE.
Alkis is a recipient of the ACM DOLAP 2023 Test-of-Time Award, several best paper/demo awards (VLDB 2025, IEEE ICDE 2024, EDBT 2024, ACM CIKM 2020, ACM SIGMOD 2014 and 2012) and service awards (PVLDB 2025/2023, IEEE ICDE 2023, EDBT 2024/2023, ACM SIGMOD 2021).
