Short Bio

Idoia Ochoa is an Assistant Professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), since January 2017. In 2016 she obtained a Ph.D. from the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University, advised by Prof. Tsachy Weissman. She received her M.Sc. from the same department in 2012. Prior to Stanford, she graduated with B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunication Engineering (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Navarra, Spain, in 2009.

She has conducted internships at Google and Genapsys, and served as technical consultant for the HBO show “Silicon Valley”. She is an organizer of the Stanford Compression Forum, and a member of the Center for Science of Information. She is also an active participant of the initiative to define and establish a compression standard for genomic data, under the MPEG working group and as part of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Her research interests include data compression, bioinformatics, information theory and coding, machine learning, communications, and signal processing.

She is recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, La Caixa Graduate Fellowship, and an award for excellence from the Basque Government. Idoia was also selected to attend and give a talk at the Rising Stars Workshop at MIT in 2015.