Martin Kersten is head of the department of Information Systems of CWI and full professor in Multimedia Information Systems and Multimedia Databases at the University of Amsterdam.

His primary research interests are architectures of parallel and distributed database management systems for advanced applications. He has published extensively in this field and supervised 14 Ph-D theses covering aspects from data modelling using category theory to software architectures for image databases.

He has been visiting researcher at University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University. He has been involved in several EC IST projects in the field of database management and he has been a consultant to the European Commission in the selection and monitoring of numerous projects.

He is co-founder of Data Distilleries, MonetDB, and Vectorwise, which commercialises the database and datamining technology developed in his group. He has been non-executive board member of Consultdata (now Deloitte-Touche).