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Raúl Gracia holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering (2015, outstanding thesis award) from Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain) under the supervision of Dr. Pedro García López and Dr. Marc Sánchez Artigas. During his Ph.D., Raúl also worked as an intern at IBM Research (Haifa) and Tel-Aviv University under the supervision of Dr. Dalit Naor and Dr. Sivan Toledo, respectively. 

Raúl is a highly motivated researcher and engineer interested in distributed systems, cloud storage, data analytics and software engineering. He has published more than 30 papers (including top conferences and journals like ACM IMC, USENIX FAST, ACM SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, ACM/IFIP Middleware, and IEEE TPDS) and +20 patents. Raúl has received the Best Dataset Award at ACM IMC'15, a Highlight Paper at ACM SYSTOR'15 for a publication at USENIX FAST'15, and the Best Paper Award at ACM/IFIP Middleware'23. He has served as TPC for USENIX FAST (2026), ACM/IFIP Middleware (2024, 2025), and has co-organized the Cloud-Edge Continuum Workshop (2023, 2024, and 2025 co-located with IEEE ICNP). Raúl has also given talks at industrial events like OpenStack Summit'16, FlinkForward'18, and a keynote talk at IEEE ICDCS'25 Industry. Raúl has actively participated in EU research projects (FP7 CloudSpaces, H2020 IOStack, NearData, CloudSkin).

Raúl has worked for 5 years at Dell Technologies (ISG) as an engineer for the CNCF Pravega project: a novel distributed storage system for data streams. Pravega is at the core of Dell Streaming Data Platform: a new Dell product launched in 2020. This experience helped him to become a stronger engineer, get familiar with several standard cloud technologies, and understand how production-ready software is made and maintained.

Currently, Raúl is a Senior Principal Research Scientist at Dell CTO Office. In this role, Raúl has been instrumental in attracting ~1M€ to Dell in EU Research projects aligned with strategic topics for the company. His current activities include IP protection, customer-based PoC development, and dissemination of research outcomes in the fields of edge, cloud analytics, data management, AI/ML, and storage technologies.