Peter Boncz holds appointments as tenured researcher at CWI and professor at VU University Amsterdam. His academic background is in database systems, with the open-source column-store MonetDB the outcome of his PhD. He has a track record in bridging the gap between academia and commercial application, founding multiple startups. In 2008 he co-founded Vectorwise around the analytical database system by the same name, which pioneered vectorized query execution, and lightweight data compression; which have been adopted broadly in analytical database systems.

Recent work to make data (de)compression data-parallel and AI/GPU-friendly led to the FastLanes data format. In recent years he has collaborated closely with both Databricks and with MotherDuck — a startup that is connecting DuckDB to the cloud. DuckDB originates from the Database Architectures research group, which he leads at CWI (the Amsterdam research institute where also python was created).