Dr. Zehra Meral Özsoyoğlu is the Department Chair and Andrew R. Jennings Professor of Computing, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at Case Western Reserve University's Case School of Engineering. Meral Özsoyoğlu received her PhD in Computer Science from University of Alberta , Edmonton, Canada, her BSc. in Electrical Engineering and MSc. in Computer Science, both from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. She has been a professor at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) since 1980 where she started as as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. She has previously served as the Associate Chair for Computer Science Division of EECS Department, and she has been one of the founding members of Case Center for Computational Genomics.
Meral Özsoyoğlu is known for her research in the area of Databases and Information Systems, mainly in query languages, data models, query optimization, index structures for high dimensional spaces, and statistical databases. More recently, her research focus is in Bioinformatics and biological data management including managing, visualizing and querying genomic pathways, efficient access methods and index structures for genomic sequences, and querying pedigree data. She has been the program chair of international conferences, and has served on editorial boards of journals on the areas data bases and data management. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions of Database Systems (TODS) and is on the Board of Trustees of the Very Large Databases (VLDB) Endowment. Professor Ozsoyoglu is recipient of several awards including an IBM Faculty Award, an NSF Faculty Award for Women in Science and Technology, Distinguished Alumni Award from University of Alberta, a Service Award from EECS Department, and the Spotlight Award for Research for Women in Engineering from Mather Center for Women from CWRU .
