Tamara's photoI was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After high school I moved to the United States to go to college. I moved to Gainesville, FL to go to the University of Florida. Once I finished my undergraduate degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Florida, I moved to Miami, FL to start working for DHL Express. In Miami I worked for DHL Express for 5 years, where I had to work with large data sets. To analyze and make sense of the data sets, I started using Visual Basic for Excel and realized that I really enjoyed programming. Programming was liberating, and made me feel powerful. I decided to change my career into Computer Engineering by going back to school. I quit my job and started a masters in Computer Engineering at Duke University, in Durham NC.

As I was taking classes in computer science and architecture, I realized that Computer Architecture was my real passion. I loved learning about what really happened under the hood and loved the process with which computer architects optimize computers. As an industrial engineer, I have always thought about how to optimize systems and this gave me a new perspective about Computer Architecture. After being in the masters program for about a year, I realized I wasn’t done learning, and my thirst for learning had just increased. My computer architecture and operating systems classes had open my curiosity gates. Therefore, I decided then to become a "professional student" and continue at Duke under the PhD program. As a graduate student, not only I learned more about computer architecture, but I also learned more about doing research,  writing papers and doing technical presentations.

Throughout my career, I have always been lucky enough to have met many extraordinary colleagues, faculty and classmates that helped me get to where I am today. Today I am happy to share that I am an assistant professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder.