Jeff LeFevre is currently a Project Scientist in the Center for Research on Open Source Software at UC Santa Cruz, leading the Skyhook elastic database for the cloud project. He also collaborates with the UC Santa Cruz Systems Research Lab on storage systems research. His primary research interests are in cloud databases and storage systems. 

He received his PhD in June 2014 from UC Santa Cruz Database group and subsequently joined Hewlett Packard Enterprise Advanced R&D Lab, Big Data Platform (Vertica database) from August 2014 to September 2016 where he worked on integrating Vertica with external analytics engines such as Distributed-R and Apache Spark. At UC Santa Cruz his Ph.D. advisor was Neoklis Polyzotis and his Ph.D. thesis title is "Physical design tuning methods for emerging system architectures". His thesis focuses on cloud and hybrid (RDBMS + Hadoop) system architectures in the new context of database-as-a-service; and introduces new physical design methods for data management systems in the cloud. Abstract, Thesis. 

Previously, he received his MS from the University of California, San Diego in the Systems and Networking Group. His MS advisor was Walt Burkhard and his MS thesis title is "Improving disk array performance and reliability". He received a BS in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of South Florida. During graduate school, he spent several summers at NEC Labs working on CloudDB in the Data Management group, at Google in the Platforms Storage group, and at Teradata in the Virtual Storage Architecture group.