Before joining Pitt, she was a postdoc at University of Maryland. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University in 2001 and her B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA in 1993. Dr. Hwa's primary research interests include multilingual processing, machine translation, and semi-supervised learning methods. Additionally, she has collaborated with colleagues on information visualization, sentiment analysis, and bioinformatics. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. Her work has also been supported by NIH and DARPA. Dr. Hwa currently serves as the chair person of the executive board of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.