Martín Farach-Colton
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M.D., Ph.D.
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Computer Science and Engineering Department Chair
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Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science
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Affiliated Faculty, NYU Center for Data Science
Martín Farach-Colton is the Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the NYU Center for Data Science. Before joining NYU in 2024, he spent nearly three decades at Rutgers University, most recently as Distinguished Professor of Computer Science.
His research spans the theory and practice of algorithms and data structures, with a focus on storage systems, memory hierarchies, hashing, and computational biology. His work on cache-oblivious and write-optimized data structures led him to found Tokutek, where he served as CTO; its Fractal Tree indexing technology was acquired by Percona in 2015. Recent results on hash tables and list labeling have been covered by Quanta Magazine and Wired. He has also worked in industry as a Senior Research Scientist at Google and as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories.
Farach-Colton is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and AAAS, and a member of Argentina’s Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. He gave the 2025 Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture at the Simons Institute and has received best paper awards at FAST, PODS, ASPLOS, and SPAA. He is Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing and has chaired the program committees of SODA, ESA, and other conferences. He holds a B.S. from the University of South Carolina, an M.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland.
More information, including a full publication list, is on his website, www.farach-colton.com.
Education
University of South Carolina, 1984
B.S. in Mathematics and Chemistry
The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, 1988
M.D.
University of Maryland, 1991
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Experience
- NYU Tandon School of Engineering — Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science; Chair, Department of Computer Science and Engineering (2024–present)
- MIT CSAIL — Visiting Scientist (2023)
- VMware Research Group — Affiliated Researcher (2019–2026)
- Rutgers University, Department of Computer Science — Assistant, Associate, Full, and Distinguished Professor; Graduate Director (1994–2023)
- Tokutek (acquired by Percona) — Founder and CTO (2006–2014)
- Google — Senior Research Scientist (2000–2002)
- Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies — Member of Technical Staff (1997–1998)
- DIMACS, Rutgers University — Postdoctoral Fellow (1991–1994)
Awards
- Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (2025)
- Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (2024)
- Member, Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, Argentina (2023)
- Fellow, IEEE (2022)
- Fellow, ACM (2021)
- Fellow, SIAM (2021)
- NetApp Faculty Fellow (2016)
- Distinguished Alumnus, University of Maryland Department of Computer Science (2013)
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (1996)
- NSF CAREER Award (1995)
- Paper awards: SPAA Outstanding Paper (2026); SPAA Distinguished Paper (2025); PODS Best Paper and ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight (2024); ASPLOS Distinguished Paper and IEEE Micro Top Pick (2023); FAST Best Paper (2016); LATIN Imre Simon Test-of-Time Award (2012)
Publications
A complete list of publications, with links to free copies, is on Prof. Farach-Colton’s website and Google Scholar. Selected recent and highlighted papers:
- “The Local/Global Disk Problem: How to Use Shared High-Bandwidth Storage Economically,” SPAA 2026 (Outstanding Paper Award)
- “Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without Reordering,” FOCS 2024
- “Nearly Optimal List Labeling,” FOCS 2024
- “History-Independent Dynamic Partitioning: Operation-Order Privacy in Ordered Data Structures,” PODS 2024 (Best Paper Award)
- “Mosaic Pages: Big TLB Reach with Small Pages,” ASPLOS 2023 (Distinguished Paper Award)
- “Cache-Oblivious B-Trees,” SIAM Journal on Computing, 2005
Research Centers, Labs, and Groups
