Stanley Zdonik

Stanley Zdonik (June 25, 1947 - February 5, 2026) was an American computer scientist specializing in database management systems, a tenured professor of computer science at Brown University. After completing two bachelor's and two master's degrees at MIT, he earned a PhD in database management under Michael Hammer. In the mid-1970s he worked on the Prophet data management system at Bolt Beranek and Newman, then became a leading researcher in object-oriented databases at Brown, publishing over one hundred peer-reviewed papers in the database field and named an ACM Fellow in 2006. He co-founded the StreamBase and Vertica companies and was involved in the Aurora, Borealis, C-Store and H-Store database projects with researchers including Michael Stonebraker and Sam Madden.