She is the director of the Urban Computing Lab and she is also affiliated with the CLIP Lab, the Center for Geospatial Information Science and the Maryland Population Research Center. Her main research objective is to advance the field of data science for social good with a focus on enhancing decision making processes through data-driven approaches using novel sources of information. She received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Columbia University. From 2009 to 2013, she was a researcher in the Data Mining and User Modeling Group at Telefonica Research in Madrid, Spain. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the World Bank.