Professor Popescu combines her training as a civil engineer and a mathematician to focus her research on computational methods, aspects of flood modeling and vulnerability related to floods, lake and reservoir modeling, and water supply systems modeling and optimisation. She was the first woman to join the Department of Hydroinformatics and Knowledge Management in an academic position at IHE Delft 24 years ago, and remained the only one for 8 years. She is a member of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research(IAHR), the European Geophysical Union (EGU) and of the SENSE research school. For the last six years she has been part of the scientific committee of World Data Systems of International Council for Science.