Don Chamberlin holds a B.S. degree from Harvey Mudd College and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. For many years, he worked at Almaden Research Center, researching database languages and systems. He was a member of the System R research team that developed much of today’s relational database technology and, together with Ray Boyce, he designed the original SQL database language.
More recently, he was a member of the W3C Working Group on XML Query Languages and an editor of the XPath 2.0 and XQuery language specifications, which became W3C Recommendations in 2007. With Jonathan Robie and Dana Florescu, he designed the Quilt language, which became the basis for the design of XQuery.
He likes to teach and recently taught a Java programming class at University of California, Santa Cruz. For the last several years he has been a judge and problem contributor to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.