Jens Teubner is the head of the Databases and Information Systems Group at TU Dortmund since April 2013. Previously, he held positions as a postdoc at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab in New York, USA and as a senior researcher ("Oberassistent") at the Systems Group of ETH Zürich. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from TU München (graduated in 2006 under the guidance of Torsten Grust; topic: XML query processing) and a Masters degree ("Diplom") in physics from the University of Konstanz in Germany (advisor: Ernst Bucher).

The focus of Jens Teubner's research is the implementation of database systems on modern hardware architectures. He is the founder of Avalanche, a research project at ETH Zürich that has quickly become an international leader in the use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for database tasks. He co-developed one of the fastest in-memory join implementations available today and showed how hardware acceleration in modern network cards (by means of Remote Direct Memory Access, RDMA) can be used to speed up join processing in distributed databases. During his PhD, Jens Teubner was concerned with scalable evaluation techniques for XML, in particular by using relational database technology as a back-end. The outcome of this work—the XQuery compiler Pathfinder—has become known as part of the open source system MonetDB/XQuery.

For his dissertation Pathfinder: XQuery Compilation Techniques for Relational Database Targets, in 2007 Jens Teubner received the PhD dissertation award of the German-speaking database community (“BTW-Dissertationspreis”). He received a best demo award at the German BTW 2011 conference, a best paper award at FCCM 2013, and a honorable mention at ICDE 2013. Jens Teubner has served in the program committee of several major (database) conferences and as a reviewer for journals. He is an Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment 2013 and a member of the EDBT Endowment.