From January 1997 to December 2000, Dr. Markl worked for the Bavarian Research Center for Knowledge-Based Systems (FORWISS) in Munich, Germany as deputy research group manager, leading the MISTRAL and MDA projects, thereby cooperating with SAP AG, NEC, Hitachi, Teijin Systems Technology, GfK, and Microsoft Research. His MDA project, jointly with TransAction Software, developed the relational database management system TransBase HyperCube, which was awarded the European IST Prize 2001 by EUROCASE and the European Commission.

Dr. Markl also initiated and co-ordinated the EDITH EU IST project investigating the physical clustering of multiple hierarchies and its applications to GIS and Data Warehousing that now is being carried out by FORWISS and several partners from Germany, Italy, Greece, and Poland.

Volker Markl is a graduate of the Technische Universität München, where he earned a Masters degree in Computer Science in 1995. He completed his PhD in 1999 under the supervision of Rudolf Bayer. His dissertation on "Relational Query Processing Using a Multidimensional Access Technique" was honored "with distinction" by the German Computer Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik). He also earned a degree in Business Administration from the University Hagen, Germany in 1995. Since 1996, Volker Markl has published more than 30 reviewed papers at prestigious scientific conferences and journals, filed more than 10 patents and has been invited speaker at many universities and companies. Dr. Markl is member of the German Computer Society (GI) as well as the Special Interest Group on Management of Data of the Assosication for Computing Machinery (ACM SIGMOD). He also serves as program committee member and reviewer for several international conferences and journals, including SIGMOD, ICDE, VLDB, TKDE, TODS, IS, and the Computer Journal. His main research interests are on autonomic computing, query processing, and query optimization, but also include applications like data warehousing, electronic commerce and pervasive computing.