Donald Kossmann is a renowned computer scientist and professor who has made notable contributions during his career. He received his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich in 1995 and has since been working in academia and industry. Kossmann is a professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Data and Information Management group. His research interests include data management, cloud computing, and database systems.

Kossmann is widely recognized for his research on ad-hoc data processing, which facilitated the development of Google BigQuery. He has authored over 100 technical papers and received numerous awards for his work, including the VLDB 10-Year Best Paper award in 2009.

Before joining ETH Zurich, Kossmann taught at the University of Passau and the Technical University of Munich. He has also worked in industry, including as a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and as the CTO of a startup.

In addition to his academic work, Kossmann is an advocate for open science and has served on the board of multiple organizations promoting open-source and open-access research.