Nicole Schweikardt

Professor at the Humboldt-Unizersität zu Berlin

Short biography

Nicole Schweikardt currently is a professor at the department of computer science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She graduated in mathematics and computer science at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz in 1998 and received her PhD in computer science from the same university in 2002. Her main research interests are in logic, database theory, and complexity theory, with a focus on the complexity of processing massive datasets, efficient query evaluation, and the expressivity and complexity of query languages and logics. She has supervised 6 PhD theses and various research projects in these areas. She has given invited lectures and tutorial at leading conferences in the field, including the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), the International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) and the International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS).

Current and previous positions

She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh (2002-2003) and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2003-2007), and a professor at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (2007-2014). Since 2014, she is a full professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, heading the logic in the computer science group.

Awards and distinctions

She was awarded the GI-Dissertationspreis 2002. In 2005 she received an Emmy-Noether Independent Junior Research Group Leadership and was selected as a member of the Young Academy (a joint project of Germany's two oldest academies, the Leopoldina and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities). In 2007 she received the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Prize, and in 2015 she received the teaching award of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Selected papers

  • Christoph Berkholz, Jens Keppeler, Nicole Schweikardt: Answering Conjunctive Queries under Updates. In: Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS 2017), pp. 303-318, 2017.
  • Dietrich Kuske and Nicole Schweikardt: First-order logic with counting. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2017), pp. 1-12, 2017.
  • Frederik Harwath, Lucas Heimberg, Nicole Schweikardt: Preservation and decomposition theorems for bounded degree structures. Logical Methods in Computer Science 11(4), 2015.
  • Matthew Anderson, Dieter van Melkebeek, Nicole Schweikardt, Luc Segoufin: Locality from Circuit Lower Bounds. SIAM Journal on Computing 41(6): 1481-1523, 2012.
  • Martin Grohe, AndrĂ© Hernich, Nicole Schweikardt: Lower bounds for processing data with few random accesses to external memory. Journal of the ACM 56(3): 12:1-12:58, 2009.

More information can be found in her personal webpage.