Kyu-Young Whang graduated (Summa Cum Laude) from Seoul National University in 1973 and received the M.S. degrees from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1975, and Stanford University in 1982. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1984. From 1983 to 1991, he was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. In 1990, he joined the faculty of KAIST, where he currently is a KAIST Distinguished Professor at  School of Computing. From 1999 to 2016 he led Advanced IT Research Center (AITrc), an ERC of National Research Foundation of Korea, as the director establishing IT/Software research in Korea. His research interests encompass physical database design, query optimization, DBMS/search engine technologies, and more recently, Big Data management systems, IR, spatial databases, data mining, and XML.  

Dr. Whang served as an Editor-in-Chief of the VLDB Journal from 2003-2009 (Coordinating EIC from 2007-2009) after serving the editorial board as a founding member for thirteen years.  He served as a trustee of the VLDB Endowment from 1998 to 2004 (and reelected from 2010-2016) and as the General Chair of VLDB 2006. Dr. Whang served as the chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (IEEE TCDE) from 2013-2015, and has been serving as an advisor to date. He made selfless efforts and contribution to globalization of Korean computer science research community by spearheading many internationalization efforts of computer science research activities, especially, in the database area, and by serving as the President of Korean Institute of Information Scientist and Engineers (KIISE) in 2007.   He was awarded the prestigious Korea Engineering Award (Presidential Award) in 2012 and Korean Supreme Scientist/Engineer Award (Presidential Award) in 2017 for his research contribution and for contribution to Korean IT/Software industry development. He received the prestigious ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award (2014) (http://www.sigmod.org/sigmod-awards), DASFAA Outstanding Contributions Award (2011), and PAKDD Distinguished Contributions Award (2014) for his dedicated and sustained contributions to promote database research at both world-wide and regional & domestic levels.  

Dr. Whang is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Life Fellow, and had long been a member of IFIP WG 2.6 (1994-2012). Dr. Whang is a member of Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST), a senior member of National Academy of Engineering of Korea (NAEK).  He was elected to be a life-time member (the first in computer science and engineering) of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences Republic of Korea (highest scholarly honor in Korea) in 2018.