Natalia Schmid is a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at West Virginia University, USA. She received a Ph.D. in Engineering from the Russian Academy of Sciences and a D.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MO. Her current research interests include detection and estimation, statistical signal processing, learning theory and information theory with application to biometrics, identity management, and radio astronomy. She has authored and co-authored over 100 publications. She is a member of IEEE and SPIE. She has served as a committee member for several international conferences.