She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science (University of California Riverside - UCR, 2007), and MSc and BSc in Computer Science as well (UFRGS, Brazil, 2001, 1999). She is a member of the ACM Education Council, ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGCSE, ACM-W, IEEE, IEEE WIE, SBC, and MentorNet. She was the Education Director of SBC (Brazilian Computer Society, 2009-2015) and the editor-in-chief of the electrocnic magazine SBC Horizontes (2008-2012). Mirella has been working with research in Computer Science in the area of Databases since 1997. Her research interests include query optimization, stream processing, hybrid XML/relational modeling and social networks.