I am a second-year PhD student in the department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. My adviser is Prof. Mohamed Mokbel and we are currently working on the problem of using graphical processing units (GPUs) for accelerating spatial operations. Mr research interests are in the areas of data management, query optimization and execution, spatial databases, and advanced hardware.

Prior to joining UMN, I was a Software Developer at SAP Labs from Aug 2010 to Sept 2013, where I worked on the internals of database systems, specifically, in the area of query optimization and execution. Before joining SAP Labs, I completed my masters in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay with a specialization in databases. During my masters, I had the privilege of working with Prof. Krithi Ramamritham and Prof. S. Sudarshan.

• Harshada Chavan, Rami Alghamdi, and Mohamed Mokbel. “Towards a GPU accelerated spatial computing framework”. International Workshop on Big Data Management on Emerging Hardware-HardBD 2016, co-located with ICDE 2016, Helsinki, Finland, 2016.