Val Tannen is a computer scientist known for his contributions to the fields of database systems and programming languages.

Tannen was born in Romania and received his undergraduate degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest.

After emigrating to the US, he received his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Albert Meyer.

One of Tannen’s major contributions is the use of structural recursion to define a query language for nested relations.

[3] In addition to databases and programming languages, Tannen has contributed to bioinformatics and to systematic and evolutionary biology.