Amr El Abbadi appointed Department Chair

After four years of tremendous service, Linda Petzold is ending her tenure
as department chair, a position to be filled by Amr El Abbadi starting
July of 2007. In August 1987 Professor El Abbadi joined UC Santa Barbara,
where he has become a world leader in information management and
distributed systems. Over his career to this point he has co-authored more
than 200 research papers and graduated 11 Masters and 24 PhD students,
placing many in top industry and academic institutions. In 2007 Professor El
Abbadi won the prestigious UCSB Academic Senate Outstanding Graduate
Mentor Award in recognition of his tremendous work with graduate students.
El Abbadi’s main research interests and accomplishments have been in
understanding and developing basic mechanisms for supporting distributed
information management systems, including databases, digital libraries,
peer-to-peer systems, and spatial databases.