I currently hold a contractually-limited appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. My teaching strengths lie in sparking student interest into computer science, from introductory programming courses, to exploring more advanced topics in the area of systems and databases. I recently graduated from the PhD program in the Department of Computer Science, in the Computer Systems and Network Group, under the supervision of Prof. Angela Demke Brown. My PhD committee included Prof. Cristiana Amza and Prof. Nick Koudas. My thesis focused on analyzing and improving the performance of spatial data processing. In a nutshell, this work focuses on gaining an understanding of the properties of spatial database workloads and exploring avenues for improving spatial query execution within the DBMS engine. I completed an MASc thesis in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in the Computer Systems Lab. My advisor was Prof. Cristiana Amza. My thesis focused on parallelization of multiplayer game servers using Software Transactional Memory, and can be found here. The results have also been published in Eurosys 2010. Previously I have completed a Bachelor's degree at University "Politehnica" of Bucharest, Department of Computer Science and Automatic Control, with a graduation project on Grid scheduling algorithms, supervised by Professors Valentin Cristea and Florin Pop