Alexander Szalay is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University. He is now also Professor in Oncology and Dermatology. He is the Director of IDIES, the Institue for Data Intensive Engineering and Science. He is the architect for the Science Archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. His papers span areas from astronomy, spatial statistics, computer science and more recently cancer research.

He is a Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007 he received the Microsoft Jim Gray Award. In 2015 he received the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award for his contributions to Data Intensive Computing. In 2020 he was awarded the Victor Ambartsumian International Science Prize for his work in physical cosmology. In 2021 he was one of the winners of the German Falling Walls prizes in Life Sciences and the SDSS team was awarded the 2021 ACM SIGMOD Systems Prize.