Academic biography

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Dublin City University. My research and professional interests centre on database performance, optimisation, and migration, with a strong emphasis on bridging the gap between academic research and industrial application.

In 2007, I commenced a PhD in XML database performance. The project was prototype-driven, providing a deep understanding of core database technologies, including join processing algorithms and indexing mechanisms. In 2010, the technology developed during my PhD was adopted by a prominent software company in the travel industry to optimise the performance of their hotel search engine. To support this, I secured an Innovation Partnership grant from Enterprise Ireland. The project was highly successful and resulted in a software licence agreement with Dublin City University in 2012.

Following this success, it became clear that a sophisticated migration process was required to bring the licensed technology into production. In 2013, I was engaged as an independent consultant, working closely with agile scrum development teams to implement the technology. This role provided first-hand experience of the challenges of large-scale database migration in live production systems.

Later that year, I founded the Database Performance and Migration Group (DPMG) at DCU, leading a dedicated research team in creating an innovative database migration product suite. Through this work, I developed expertise in large-scale event processing, query parsing and rewriting, and plugin-based system design. Building on this foundation, I established Optimality Technologies in 2015, a company specialising in extending the lifespan of enterprise software applications through advanced database products and services.

I served as CEO of Optimality Technologies for two years, after which I spent seven years in industry as a Big Data Engineer. In 2024, I returned to Dublin City University as an Assistant Professor, where I now bring together my academic expertise and industry experience to inform both my teaching and research.

My research is currently focused on:

• Big Data
• Database Performance and Optimisation
• Vector Databases
• The Semantic Web
• Artificial Intelligence for Database Technology and Software Engineering