Her primary research interests are in regulatory genomics. Her laboratory, located in the Duke Center for Genomic and Computational Biology, develops computational methods and high-throughput experimental techniques to quantitatively characterize protein-DNA interactions and their role in gene regulation. Raluca began her career as a computer scientist and received her B.S. in computer science from University of Iasi, Romania. Her Ph.D. work, in the Computer Science department at Duke, focused on applications of machine learning techniques to problems in computational regulatory genomics. In 2009, Raluca started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Medical School, where she gained experimental skills as she continued her work on deciphering protein-DNA recognition mechanisms. Raluca joined Duke as an assistant professor in 2011.