“I'm an accidental computer scientist!”

“I was especially honored to be selected for this award after I saw the list of previous winners – that was very humbling,” says Margo Seltzer. “I consider many of those women to be leading figures in their fields.”

Seltzer, a Canada 150 Research Chair and Cheriton Family Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Canada, has been named the winner of the 2026 Erna Hamburger Award. The award was created by the EPFL-WISH (Women In Science and Humanities) Foundation in 2006 and is handed out every year to an inspiring, influential female scientist or engineer who is transforming her field and serving as a model for future generations. Seltzer will receive the award – and deliver a talk – at a ceremony at EPFL’s Lausanne campus at 6:30pm on 11 November 2026.

A widely respected computer scientist, originally from the US, Seltzer built her research around systems in the broadest sense: tools for collecting and using data provenance, databases and file systems, transaction processing systems, systems for storing and analyzing graph-structured data, and efficient algorithms and tools for training machine learning models.

The EPFL Wish Foundation committee selected her “for her exceptional contributions in the field of computer science, in particular the development of new storage paradigms and widely adopted software solutions, as well as her long-standing commitment to diversity, inclusion and mentoring, notably her support for women and young researchers in the computing community.”

“One of the things I'm most proud of”

As the author of several widely used software programs, she is best known for co-founding Sleepycat Software in 1996. That name may not mean much to the general public, but industry experts are well aware of it. The company developed Berkeley DB – an embedded database software library that marked a major breakthrough in terms of speed and efficiency when it was launched. Berkeley DB was the database that enabled first-generation web sites and services such as Amazon.com’s personalized home page, Valve Software’s Steam Engine Billing System, and Google’s account management. Creating and managing Sleepycat Software with her husband, Keith Bostic – also a computer scientist – “is one of the things I'm most proud of,” she says. Sleepycat was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2006.

Seltzer was born in upstate New York. She holds an A.B. degree in applied mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College and a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. “I consider myself to be an accidental computer scientist!” she says. “When I started college, all I knew was that I was pretty good in math and science. I ended up in applied mathematics. Then, when I had to choose a specialization, I picked computer science because that’s what my older brother did – I figured if he could do it, then I could too!”

The same pioneering spirit

Seltzer has had a distinguished career in academia. Before joining the University of British Columbia, where she now co-heads the computer science department, she was a professor at Harvard University. She started out as an assistant professor of computer science in 1993, was promoted to associate professor in 1997, was named full professor in 2000, served as associate dean from 2002 to 2006, and retired in 2018.

She has also been honored with numerous awards, including the 2023 ACM Athena Lecturer Award, the ACM Software Systems Award, the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, and several distinctions recognizing her skills as a teacher and mentor. Her peers also readily highlight her commitment and efforts toward greater inclusivity of women and minorities within the “systems specialists” community.

Winning the Erna Hamburger Award gave Seltzer an opportunity to learn more about the outstanding career of the Swiss engineer the award was named for. Hamburger was a full professor at EPFL from 1967 to 1979 and the first woman to hold such a position at a Swiss institute of technology. “I was really inspired by her story, which resonates with me – I’ve also often been the ‘first woman to do this or that,’” says Seltzer. “I was deeply moved by her experience, and I can only imagine the obstacles she had to overcome to achieve everything she did.”

A feeling of accomplishment

Today, alongside her family, her beloved three children, and her passions for women’s soccer and baking impressive cakes, one of the main things that Seltzer finds both motivating and rewarding is passing her knowledge on to students. “One of them summarized my philosophy better than I could’ve done myself: what matters to me aren’t the research articles I publish or the awards I win, but my students,” she says. “These people are what give me joy and a genuine feeling of accomplishment.”