He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005. His research interests are in different aspects of database theory, such as expressive power of query languages, database semantics, inconsistency handling, database design, XML databases, data exchange, metadata management and database aspects of the Semantic Web. He has received an IBM PhD Fellowship (2004), seven best paper awards (PODS 2003, PODS 2005, ISWC 2006, ICDT 2010, ESWC 2011, PODS 2011 and WWW 2012) and an ACM-SIGMOD Dissertation Award Honorable Mention in 2006 for his PhD dissertation 'Design Principles for XML Data'. He has served on multiple program committees, and since 2009 he has been participating as an invited expert in the World Wide Web Consortium.Marcelo Arenas has an academic affiliation as follows - Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.