Prof Lorena Barba received her PhD in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology in 2004. She is currently Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University, since 2008, and was previously Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Bristol, UK. Her first degrees (BSc, PEng) are from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Valparaíso, Chile. 

Prof Barba leads a research group working in algorithms and applications of GPU computing, with a main focus in computational fluid dynamics. Her areas of expertise include unsteady fluid flows, vortex dynamics and vortex methods, immersed boundary methods, and fast N-body simulations. She has carried out work in the development and application of parallel algorithms in these and other areas; a recent example involves modeling the electrostatic effects in proteins using parallel fast boundary element methods. 

Along with her growing list of achievements in scientific computing, Lorena Barba is a natural leader and a resourceful organizer. While in the UK, she led an EC-funded international project titled "Scientific Computing Advanced Training, SCAT" involving nine universities and one national laboratory in Europe and Latin America. The project provided funding and research experience for more than 30 young scientists, held 10 international scientific meetings, and triggered several new international collaborations.  

She is also very interested and involved in educational efforts, having recently organized in Chile the NSF Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute titled "Scientific computing in the Americas: the challenge of massive parallelism", among other efforts. The lectures from this institute are available for free download on iTunes U, as are Prof Barba's lectures in Fluid Mechanics and Computational Fluid Dynamics.  

Prof Barba is an advocate of open science and open-source software. She maintains a policy of openly sharing all code generated in her research group. 

More information can be found in Prof Barba's research group website: http://barbagroup.bu.edu/