Dr. Rick Cattell, a Distinguished Engineer at JavaSoft, led the design of the JDBC API. He is currently Chief Architect for the Java Enterprise Technologies group. He was previously responsible for SunSoft's NEO CORBA database integration and the Sun Simplify database GUI. Widely recognized for his contributions to the database field, Dr. Cattell was a cofounder of SQL Access, founder and chair of the Object Database Management Group (ODMG), and author of the first monograph on object database systems as well as more than 40 papers and 3 books.