Mirela Andronescu received her B.Sc. in Computational Economics from the Academy of Economic Studies of Bucharest, Romania, in 1999. In 2001, she joined the Department of Computer Science’s bioinformatics group of the BETA lab at the University of British Columbia. She received her M.Sc. degree in 2003 and her Ph.D. degree in 2008 and was awarded the Governer’s Generals Award for her work on Computational approaches for RNA energy parameter estimation. Mirela then did an NSERC post-doctoral fellowship in Noble lab at the University of Washington’s Department of Genome Sciences. After returning to Vancouver with her family, she now works as a Bioinformatics Scientist in the Aparicio Lab specializing the statistics and algorithms development.