Erik Riedel is a Doctoral Student in Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University working with Garth Gibson in the Parallel Data Lab (PDL) and Christos Faloutsos in the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (CALD). His thesis work is on Active Disks as an extension of Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD), and he has spent time looking at I/O in a number areas, including parallel applications (Scalable I/O Initiative), scientific systems (Schlumberger Oilfield Services), and Windows NT (Usenix NT '98 Best Student Paper Award).

Before he became a storage guy, Erik worked on an NSF Grand Challenge project in Environmental Modeling and earned a Master's degree in Software Engineering.

Erik was born in Wuerzburg, Germany and - even after 20 years in the United States - is still occasionally puzzled by strange American customs like peanut butter.