Martin L. Kersten is a computer scientist with research focus on database architectures, query optimization and their use in scientific databases. He is an architect of the MonetDB system, an open-source column store database for data warehouses, online analytical processing (OLAP) and geographic information systems (GIS). For this work he received the prestigious ACM SIGMOD E.F. Codd Innovation Award and the ACM SIGMOD Systems Award. He published more than 150 papers and is an ACM Research Fellow. He has been (co-) founder of several successful spin-offs of CWI such as Data Distilleries and MonetDB.