Amr El Abbadi is a Professor of Computer Science and the former chair of the department. Dr. Abbadi’s research interests are the ever increasing amount of data being generated and analyzed. He has been involved in designing systems and database support for collaborative environments with a special interest in social media applications and issues related to privacy preservation. Professor Abbadi is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS, and served as a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002 - 2008 as well as the Executive Committee of the Technical Committee of Data Engineering (TCDE).