She is a recipient of the McCandless Chair, the NSF CAREER award, the NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Mathematical Sciences, multiple best paper awards, and several teaching awards, including the Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence and the campus-wide Teaching Effectiveness Award. She is a leader in the ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance community, for which she recently served as Technical Program Chair, and has served on the Technical Program Committee twelve times. Harchol-Balter's work integrates queueing theoretic analysis with low-level computer systems implementation. Her research is on designing new resource allocation policies (load balancing policies, power management policies, and scheduling policies) for server farms and distributed systems in general, where she emphasizes integrating measured workload distributions into the problem solution.