Lavanya Ramakrishnan is the Group Lead of the Usable Software Systems Group, in the Data Science and Technology department at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her research interests are in software tools for computational and data-intensive science. Her current projects are exploring programming templates for data analysis workflow composition and data management techniques for elastic transient environments. She has also evaluated cloud and big data technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL databases for scientific applications and performance, energy and fault-tolerance trade-offs in infrastructure strategies. Ramakrishnan has also worked closely with scientists from multiple domains including bioinformatics, biomedical science, storm-surge modeling, weather modeling, high-energy physics and light source facilities. Ramakrishnan has previously worked as a research staff member at Renaissance Computing Institute and MCNC in North Carolina. She has a MS and PhD in Computer Science from Indiana University and a bachelor degree in computer engineering from VJTI, University of Mumbai. She joined LBL as an Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellow in 2009.