Nidhal Carla Bouaynaya (Member, IEEE) received the M.S. degree in pure mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, in 2007, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering (ECE). She is currently a Professor in ECE and the Director of the Machine, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality Center (MAVRC), Rowan University. She is also the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies with the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering. Her research interests include big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and mathematical optimization. She has coauthored over 120 refereed journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings, such as IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and PLOS Medicine. She won numerous Best Paper Awards, the most recent was at the 2019 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing. She also won the Top Algorithm at the 2016 Multinomial Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BRATS). Her research is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation, The National Institutes of Health, U.S. Army Picatinny Arsenal, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Federal Aviation Administration, and Lockheed Martin Inc., among others. She is also interested in entrepreneurial endeavors. In 2017, she co-founded MRIMATH LLC, a start-up company that uses artificial intelligence to improve patient oncology outcomes and treatment responses. MRIMath was awarded NIH SBIR Phases I and II contracts.