Mihaela Iridon received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics and Computer Automation from Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu, Romania in 1993. Her thesis was in the fields of A.I. and Expert Systems, more specifically Bayesian Networks applied to Electrical and Medical Diagnosis.

After teaching for two years at the same university in Romania, in January 1996 she came to study in the United States at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She received her second MS degree in December 1997, and her Ph.D. in July 1999, both degrees in Computer Science. For her doctoral thesis Mihaela focused on algorithms, graph theory and cellular networks.

In August 1999, Dr. Iridon started working as a software engineer for Bell Atlantic which, after the merger with GTE in 2000, became Verizon, one of the biggest telecommunication companies in the United States. In 2006, as a result of the merger with MCI, the department she was working under became part of a new Verizon branch, Verizon Business.

For almost eight years Mihaela worked in the areas of computer telephony integration (CTI), interactive voice response applications, desktop and web technologies, becoming a subject matter expert in OOAD/UML, the .NET and the J2EE platforms, as well as specializing in Alcatel’s Genesys integration framework. While a senior software engineer at Verizon, she continued some of the research in graph theory and published a couple of journal papers related to her doctoral thesis.

Her current research interests have broadened to include also computational geometry, A.I., and expert systems, with primary focus on applications to other domains such as music, visual arts, and cognitive and social studies.