She received her Bachelors degree from the Indiana University School of Music in 1982 and her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1987. From 1987-88 she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell. Before coming to Stanford in 1993, she spent five years as a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Professor Widom's research interests include active database languages, systems and applications, distributed and heterogeneous database systems, and database constraint management.