She received her Bachelor's degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, in 1986 and her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University in 1993, where she continued as a research scientist in the Computer Science department until 1996. Her research interests are in compiler/architecture/run-time interaction, computer architecture, parallel and distributed systems, and performance evaluation. Dr. Dwarkadas has been the recipient of an NSF CISE Experimental Science Postdoctoral Fellowship (1993-1995), and an NSF CAREER Award for junior faculty (1997-2000).