title: Isabel Cruz
text: # Isabel Cruz
  
  Isabel Cruz (aka Isabel F. Cruz, Maria Isabel Cruz) (died 2021) was an American Portuguese computer scientist known for her research on databases, knowledge representation, geographic information systems, AI, visual languages, graph drawing, user interfaces, multimedia, information retrieval, and security. She was a University of Illinois Chicago Distinguished Professor and a Professor Computer Science in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago. She was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
  
  ## Life
  
  Cruz was born in Lisbon. completed a MS (1987) and PhD (1993) in computer science at the University of Toronto advised by Alberto O. Mendelzon. She conducted her postdoctoral research at Brown University advised by Paris Kanellakis. She was the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1996. Cruz joined the University of Illinois Chicago College of Engineering in 2001. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019 and was appointed UIC Distinguished Professor in 2020. Cruz's research focused on databases, big data, geographic information systems, Semantic Web, and knowledge representation.
  
  She died on September 19, 2021.
  
  ## Recognition
  
  Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, elected "for her distinguished contributions to visual query languages, information integration and visualization, geospatial computing and for professional leadership in the data management community".
  
  University of Illinois Chicago Distinguished Professor
  
  University of Illinois Faculty Scholar Award
  
  University of Illinois Chicago Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholar Award
  
  University of Illinois Chicago College of Engineering Faculty Research Award
  
  University of Illinois Chicago Teaching Recognition Program Award
  
  Association for Computing Machinery Recognition of Service Award
  
  National Science Foundation CAREER Award
  
  ## Personal life
  
  Cruz was married to Roberto Tamassia, also a noted computer scientist.
  
  