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IBM, Airbnb exec Adam Kocoloski ’04 credits physics, philosophy degree for success

By Dave Larsen

University of Dayton alumnus Adam Kocoloski ’04 credits an interdisciplinary degree in philosophy and physics for laying the foundation for his software engineering career.

He launched the distributed database service Cloudant with two lab mates while pursuing his physics doctoral degree at MIT, sold it to IBM five years later and was named a 2016 IBM fellow. He now serves as a distinguished engineer at Airbnb.

Kocoloski is giving back to UD as a member of the College of Arts and Sciences advisory council, a group of 18 alumni and friends of UD who provide College Dean Danielle Poe with insight into emerging opportunities and needs in their fields to enhance curriculum, research and mentoring opportunities for students.

“Adam's success and experience as co-founder of Cloudant, vice president and chief technical officer for IBM Cloud Data Services and distinguished engineer for Airbnb brings valuable insight to the council and helps me to be mindful that we're preparing our students for a lifetime of meaningful work and not just for the first job,” Poe said. “I also appreciate that Adam's background at UD integrated physics and philosophy — the humanities and the natural sciences — a combination that will inspire current students to explore their vocations beyond traditional boundaries.”

Kocoloski entered UD as a computer engineering major but switched to philosophy because he enjoyed exploring questions far removed from the coding assignments and engineering work at the core of his original curriculum.

He added a physics major at the suggestion of Professor Emeritus Bob Brecha, who noticed his aptitude for the discipline.

“Bob said, ‘This stuff seems to come naturally to you,’” Kocoloski recalled. “‘You’re a philosophy major and physics is a way to ask some of these big questions and come up with experiments that help try to answer them.’”

UD Department of Physics faculty helped him get involved in the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. With support from Todd Smith, associate professor of physics, Kocoloski spent summer 2003 interning at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

“Adam was an exceptional physics major and one of the brightest students I have ever met,” said Smith, who served as Kocoloski’s honors program academic advisor and helped him turn his CERN research experience into an honors thesis.

“Together we learned a lot about the Compact Muon Solenoid at the Large Hadron Collider,” Smith said. “I would describe working with him more as collaborative than as teacher-to-student. His work was more typical of an advanced graduate student than an undergraduate.”

Kocoloski continued his experimental particle physics research as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying the gluon’s contribution to the spin structure of the proton. He and his research partners used large “computer farms” at MIT and other national laboratories to run data-intensive simulations.

“We learned how to solve a lot of problems in a diverse range of computing sectors,” Kocoloski said. “At the same time, we’re looking at industry and seeing Google, Amazon, Yahoo and other tech companies that had really scaled over the 2000s eclipse ‘big science’ in the scale of problems they were having to solve and in the ingenuity of the solutions they were providing. They hadn’t yet turned that into a commercial business selling to other companies, but you could see the writing on the wall.”

In 2009, Kocoloski and his research partners founded Cloudant as a database-as-a-service for developers to build apps. He worked as the company’s primary coder while finishing his doctoral dissertation.

IBM acquired Cloudant in 2014, which helped the technology giant transform into a cloud company. Kocoloski rose through IBM’s technical ranks, helping the company become an open-source community leader. He was named an IBM distinguished engineer and ultimately an IBM fellow.

In 2021, Kocoloski joined Airbnb to help mature the software that powers a consumer application used by millions of people around the globe. Currently, he is focused on developer productivity and the infrastructure that helps the company make sense of the data it collects.

“It’s an interesting space to be in,” he said. “Especially with the amount of investment that companies put into software engineering these days, finding ways to help those engineers be as productive and focused as they can be is a worthwhile goal for the company to pursue.”

Kocoloski is one of six siblings, all of whom are UD graduates. His youngest sister, Genevieve, was married on campus in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception.

His wife, Hillary (Sulens) Kocoloski ’04, graduated from the UD School of Education and Health Sciences and went on to earn a doctor of physical therapy degree at Massachusetts General Hospital's Institute of Health Professions.

Kocoloski has enjoyed the opportunity to re-engage with the University of Dayton by serving on the College advisory council and sharing his experience with faculty and students.

“One of the things that has been most helpful to me in my career is the ability to express myself clearly in speaking and writing — being able to understand someone else’s point of view, find common points and get to consensus,” he said. “Success in that endeavor is quite a bit more likely if you’ve got this strong foundation of skills that are honed in the humanities and social sciences. I would encourage folks, regardless of major, to explore some of these electives and participate in UD’s well-rounded curriculum. Regardless of the line of work that you’re in, that competency in communication and the ability to express yourself is something that augurs well for future career success.”

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