Boon Thau Loo is the RCA Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in Electrical and Systems Engineering. He currently serves as Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Education and Global Initiatives in Penn Engineering, where he oversees all doctoral and professional master’s programs, which together include approximately 6,500 students, as well as non-degree offerings, global partnerships, and school-wide professional development initiatives. Under his leadership, Penn Engineering’s graduate population grew from 1,800 to 6,500 students in seven years.
A leading scholar in distributed systems, networking, and data management, Loo directs the NetDB@Penn research group and previously led the Distributed Systems Laboratory from 2019 to 2024, an interdisciplinary center spanning distributed systems, networking, and security. His research focuses on distributed data management, Internet-scale query processing, and data-centric and formal-methods-based approaches to designing and analyzing networked systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.S. from Stanford University, and a B.S. with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation received both the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize and the ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award.
Loo’s honors include the NSF CAREER Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, Penn’s Emerging Inventor of the Year Award, the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching, the University Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, the International Student Advocate of the Year Award, best paper awards at NSDI and EDBT, and election as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He has published more than 170 peer-reviewed papers and advised 20 Ph.D. students and three postdoctoral researchers, many of whom have become tenured or tenure-track faculty and recipients of major dissertation awards.
As an academic leader, Loo has guided several major initiatives that have transformed graduate education at Penn Engineering. His efforts include launching Penn Engineering Online, creating the accelerated master’s program, and establishing new award programs that recognize graduate student excellence. He also directed the development and expansion of multiple online degree programs, including MCIT Online, the first fully online Ivy League computer science master’s program designed for students without a computer science background, along with the MSE-DS program in data science and the MSE-AI program in artificial intelligence. His additional initiatives introduced lifelong learning opportunities for alumni, a school-wide professional development course for master’s students, and semester-long academic field study programs.
Loo is also an active technology entrepreneur. He co-founded two research-driven startups that achieved successful acquisitions. He served as co-founder and Chief Scientist of Termaxia, a software-defined, energy-efficient big data storage company founded in 2015 and acquired in 2020 by Frontiir, a fast-growing Southeast Asian technology firm. Before Termaxia, he founded Gencore Systems, also known as Netsil, a cloud microservices analytics company that commercialized the Scalanytics declarative analytics platform developed in his research group. Netsil was acquired in 2018 by Nutanix, a major public cloud infrastructure company. Loo has also collaborated extensively with industry partners, including AT&T, HP Labs, Intel, Microsoft, Perspecta Labs, and Raytheon BBN, producing research that has influenced real-world system deployments and contributed to multiple patents.