Andy Pavlo

Andrew Pavlo, best known as Andy Pavlo, is an associate professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He conducts research on database management systems and is especially interested in "main memory systems, self-driving / autonomous architectures, transaction processing systems, and large-scale data analytics". Pavlo was also a co-founder and CEO of OtterTune, a now defunct database startup that provides automatic database tuning services.

Education and career
Pavlo was born in Baltimore and went to Mt. Hebron High School.

Pavlo received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2005 and a Master of Science degree in 2006. He then went to Brown University, obtaining his second Master of Science degree in 2009. Supervised by Stanley Zdonik and Michael Stonebraker, Pavlo obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Brown with his dissertation On Scalable Transaction Execution in Partitioned Main Memory Database Management Systems, which won the 2014 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Pavlo became an assistant professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 2013 and an associate professor in 2019.

In March 2020, Pavlo and his two PhD students Dana Van Aken and Bohan Zhang co-founded OtterTune, a company focused on automatically optimizing cloud databases. He has been the company's CEO in addition to his professorship at Carnegie Mellon University. OtterTune launched in May 2021 and, in 2022, raised 12 million dollars in its series A round. OtterTune announced it was shutting down operations in June, 2024.

Awards and recognitions
Pavlo received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2018 and a NSF CAREER Award in 2019. He has also received research grants from companies such as Google and Facebook.

Pavlo won the 2014 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD dissertation On Scalable Transaction Execution in Partitioned Main Memory Database Management Systems. His PhD students Joy Arulraj and Huanchen Zhang received this award under his supervision in 2019 and 2021, respectively.