He obtained his Ph.D. in 2004 from Purdue University, and an M.Sc. and a B.Sc. from the University of Alexandria, Egypt. His main research interests include advanced query processing and optimization, self-managing and adaptive computing, and non-traditional database systems (e.g., multimedia and spatial databases). In his recent Ph.D. thesis, he has introduced novel query processing and optimization techniques for top-k queries in relational database systems. For more information, visit http://db.uwaterloo.ca/~ilyas