Susan Darling Urban
Emeritus Professor
Arizona State University
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


Curriculum Vitae

Biographical Sketch:

Susan D. Urban received the B.S, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science in 1976, 1980, and 1987, respectively, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She was a Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Texas Tech University from 2011-2015 and was previously a Professor in the Department of Computer Science from 2008-2010. She was at Arizona State University from 1989-2008, where she currently holds the status of Emeritus Professor. She was also an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami from 1987-1989.

Her research has addressed integrated techniques for event, rule, and transaction processing to address data consistency and active behavior in distributed, data-centric applications. Her more recent research has addressed the application of big data analytics in the context of intrusion detection and prevention. Dr. Urban has been the recipient of several grants from the National Science Foundation for her research on constraints, active rule processing in centralized and distributed environments, data consistency issues in service-oriented environments, the use of databases in engineering design, undergraduate research, and the development of innovative teaching concepts for database instruction. She has published over 120 refereed papers and book chapters on the results of her research and has had over $3.5M in funding, primarily from the National Science Foundation. She is a co-author, together with Suzanne Dietrich, of Fundamentals of Object Databases: Object-Oriented and Object-Relational Design (Morgan Claypool, 2011) and a co-author, together with Catherine Ricardo and Karen Davis, of Databases Illuminated, 4th Edition (Jones and Bartlett, 2022).

She has served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Data Semantics, the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and the Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering. In addition, she has served as the co-editor of special issues in the Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering Journal, Computing Systems Journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Theory and Practice of Object Systems, and the Journal of Computing and Information Science and Engineering. She has also served on the organizing and program committees of numerous database conferences and workshops, including the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, the International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, the International Conference on Ontologies, Databases, and Applications of Semantics, the International Conference on Objects and Databases, and the ACM Symposium on Computer Science Education. Dr. Urban is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE Computer Society, the American Society for Engineering Education, and the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. In 2010, she was also inducted into the Golden Key Honor Society as an honorary member.