Lewis Church

Lewis Church is a principal software developer and a member of the research and development staff at SAS Institute Inc. in Cary, North Carolina. A significant part of his responsibilities in this position is to help provide leadership for the design and implementation of SQL query processors that work in distributed, federated, and heterogeneous environments. Query optimization is one of his areas of specialization.

External to his work at SAS, he started an independent research agenda several months ago. In particular, he is performing research in the area of information retrieval performance evaluation. His future research plans include extending parts of his dissertation work and investigating several of the research threads that were identified as future work in the dissertation.

"The Ph.D. program at SILS was the most enjoyable and intellectually stimulating graduate experience that I've ever been a part of," said Lewis. "It taught me how do high quality doctoral-level research in information science. A large part of my SILS experience was the supportive faculty and the mentoring that I received  from Dr. Robert M. Losee (Lewis' advisor and dissertation committee chairman). Dr. Losee was always available to listen to my thoughts, offer encouragement, and provide comments and feedback in a very timely manner. As a result of my doctoral studies at SILS, I feel extremely confident that I'm very well-prepared for future endeavors, both academic and industrial, in certain areas of information and computer science."