Ioana Banicescu is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Mississippi State University (MSU) . Between 2009 and 2017, she was also a Director of the Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing at MSU, and also a Co-Director of the National Science Foundation Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing.Ioana's research interests include parallel algorithms, scientific computing, scheduling theory, load balancing algorithms, performance modeling, analysis and prediction. Currently, her research focus is on autonomic computing, performance optimization for problems in computational science, and graph analytics. She has given many invited talks at universities, government laboratories, and at various national and international forums in the United States and overseas. Ioana is the recipient of a number of awards for research and scholarship from the National Science Foundation (NSF). She served and continues to serve on numerous research review panels for advanced research grants in the US and Europe, on steering and program committees of a number of international ACM and IEEE conferences, symposia and workshops, and on the Executive Board and Advisory Board of the IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP). Ioana was an Associate Editor of the Cluster Computing journal and the International Journal on Computational Science and Engineering. Over the years, she was recognized with many distinctions for her scholarly contributions.