Magdalena's research interests are broadly in the fields of databases and distributed systems. Her current research focuses on data intensive scalable computing, sensor and scientific data management, and cloud computing. Magdalena holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006). She is a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow (2007), received an NSF CAREER Award (2009), an HP Labs Research Innovation Award (2009-2011), a Rogel Faculty Support Award (2006), and a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship (2003-2005).