Mary Fernández

My research sits at the juncture of database systems and programming languages and focuses on domain-specific languages for data management problems, their formal semantics, techniques for their efficient implementation, and their interaction with general-purpose programming languages.  Currently, I focus on techniques for querying, storing, and modeling semi-structured XML data, which integrates both structured data and unstructured text.

To validate and motivate my research, I build software systems that not only demonstrate a theoretical concept or model, but that are practical tools for end users and serve as experimental platforms for other researchers.  Some of the systems that I have built are listed below.

I am a member of the W3C Query Working Group, whose charter is to define a standard query language for XML. I am co-editor of the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model and the XQuery 1.0 Formal Semantics working drafts. Please note: if you have a question about these or other W3C working drafts, please post your questions to the appropriate W3C mailing list

I mentor undergraduate and graduate women in the sciences through the on-line mentoring network, MentorNet.