Dr. Drapaca is an applied mathematician who received her BS and MS from the University of Bucharest, Romania and her PhD from the University of Waterloo, Canada. She has held postdoctoral positions at the University of California in San Francisco and Mayo Clinic. In 2007, Dr. Drapaca became a faculty member at the Pennsylvania State University and she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. Her expertise is in the mathematical modeling of the brain's complex multi-physics and multi-scale processes, continuum mechanics, medical image processing, and computational analysis. The focus of her research is understanding mechanisms of the onset and evolution of brain diseases through mathematical models and numerical simulations.