Michael Franklin is the Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago where he also serves as Senior Advisor to the Provost on Computation and Data Science and as founding Faculty Co-Director of the Data Science Institute. He was the inaugural holder of the Liew Family Chair of Computer Science at UChicago, where he spearheaded the rapid growth of the department in terms of scale, scope and stature. His research is on large-scale data intelligence systems, including early efforts on massively parallel databases, federated data systems and scalable data-centric AI systems.
Prior to joining UChicago he was Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was on the faculty for 17 years and served a term as Chair of the Computer Science Division of the EECS Department. He was also Director of the Algorithms, Machines and People Laboratory (AMPLab) and was Principal Investigator of the lab’s National Science Foundation CISE “Expeditions in Computing” award. He is one of the original creators of Apache Spark, a leading open source platform for advanced data analytics and machine learning that was initially developed at the lab. He has also held visiting positions at MIT CSAIL (2024) and at research labs in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Paris.
Franklin is a Founding Advisor at Databricks and a technical advisor to data-driven technology companies and organizations, including Chicago-based startups Invocate, Ocient, and Zengines. Previously he was founding CEO and CTO of Truviso, a data analytics company acquired by Cisco Systems. He currently serves on the ACM Fellows Selection Committee and on the US National Academies Computing Breakthroughs Committee. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Computer Sciences, elected 2023) and is a fellow of the ACM, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. He received the 2022 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award, and is a two-time recipient of the ACM SIGMOD “Test of Time” award, the 2025 CIDR “Test of Time” award and Best Paper awards at leading Systems and Database conferences. He holds a Ph.D. from the Univ. of Wisconsin (1993).
Research
Focus Areas: Big Data, Databases, Distributed and Streaming Database Technology, Systems
