Silvana Castano is full professor of database and information systems at University of Milano, where she currently chairs the Information Systems & knowledge management group. Previously, she has been with the University of Milano as associate professor (1998-2001) and as assistant professor (1993-1998), respectively. She received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Politecnico di Milano, in 1993.

Her main research interests are in the area of databases and information systems and ontologies and Semantic Web, with current focus on information and application integration, semantic interoperability, knowledge sharing in peer-based systems, database and XML security. She has published her research results in the major journals of the field including ACM Transactions on database Systems, IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Information Systems, and in the refereed proceedings of the major conferences of the field (including ACM-SIGMOD, VLDB, IEEE-ICDE). She is an author of the book Database Security (Addison Wesley-ACM Press, 1995).
She is currently working in several research projects, including EU FP6 NoE INTEROP (Interoperability Research for Networked Enterprises Applications and Software) project, where she is responsible of the University of Milano group, and the FIRB WEB MINDS project, where she is responsible of the Working Group on Metadata and ontologies. Since June 1997, she is chair of the AICA Working Group on Databases.