Oana Balmau is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University, where she leads the DISCS Lab. She also holds a status-only appointment in the Computer Science department at the University of Toronto and is a part of MLCommons, where she co-founded MLPerf Storage, an open-source benchmark for storage on ML workloads. Her research focuses on storage systems and data management, with an emphasis on ML, data science, and edge computing workloads. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Sydney, advised by Prof. Willy Zwaenepoel. Before her PhD, Oana earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from EPFL, Switzerland. Oana won the CORE John Makepeace Bennet Award 2021 for the best computer science dissertation in Australia and New Zealand, an Honorable Mention for the ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award 2021, as well as Best Paper Awards in the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC) 2019, and the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC) 2024. Before joining McGill, Oana worked with Nutanix, ABB Research, and HP Vertica.