Welcome to the Home of the Penn Database Group!

As one of the top database research groups in the world, the Penn Database Group has made many fundamental contributions to the field — particularly in areas relating to scientific data management, Web data management, distributed data sharing, data provenance, and machine learning systems. Our research spans from theory to systems, AI, and applications, and it connects to other research areas within Penn’s CIS Department (such as machine learningprogramming languageslogic and computation, computer networks, distributed systems, and approximation algorithms). Within the University, we also collaborate frequently with the AIRFoundrythe Institute for Biomedical Informatics, the Center for Neuroengineering and Therapeutics, the ASSET Center, and the Warren Center for Network and Data Science. Our alumni are faculty in universities like U Washington, U Edinburgh, Duke U, IIS-Bangalore, U Toronto, and more; researchers with companies like Facebook-Meta, Amazon Web Services, and Google; and engineers all across tech.

Frequent Collaborators

Our group collaborates widely, within CIS and across campus!
Rajeev Alur

Rajeev Alur

Formal Methods, Programming Languages, Cyber-Physical Systems
Sebastian Angel

Sebastian Angel

Distributed Systems, Security
Sampath Kannan

Sampath Kannan

Algorithms, Complexity
Sanjeev Khanna

Sanjeev Khanna

Algorithms, Complexity
Brian Litt

Brian Litt

Neuroscience, implantable devices
Vincent Liu

Vincent Liu

Distributed Systems, Networking
Mayur Naik

Mayur Naik

Programming Languages, Machine Learning
Dan Roth

Dan Roth

Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning
Joost Wagenaar

Joost Wagenaar

Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics

DB News

Penn at VLDB 2025

This year, at VLDB 2025, Penn will be well-represented with a variety of papers. CausalMesh: A Causal Cache for Stateful Serverless Computing: Haoran Zhang (University of Pennsylvania); Shuai Mu (Stony Brook University); Sebastian Angel (University Read more…

Penn at SIGMOD 2025

The Penn Database and Data Systems Group is well-represented at SIGMOD 2025! At the aiDM workshop, co-chaired by our own Ryan Marcus, there are two papers: At the main SIGMOD conference, the following papers will Read more…

The Big Move!

The Penn Database Group is excited to move into Amy Gutmann Hall for the Spring! All faculty and students will be affiliated with the new lab space on the 4th Floor.