Lorena Barba is a professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. Previously, she was faculty in the College of Engineering at Boston University, and the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol, UK. She has a PhD in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology, and specializes in computational fluid dynamics and high-performance computing.

Dr. Barba has previously lived in England and Chile (where she grew up) and has several years of experience in higher education. She is an advocate of open-source software for science and open educational resources, and shares her courseware on iTunes U, YouTube, GitHub and others. She is also interested in education technology, social learning and massively open online courses, as well as innovations in STEM education, including flipped classrooms and other forms of blended learning.

She is a member of the Board of Directors of NumFOCUS, a 501(c)3 public charity in the United States that supports and promotes world-class, innovative, open-source scientific software. She is also a member of the editorial board for IEEE/AIP Computing in Science and Engineering, The Journal of Open Source Software, and The ReScience Journal. She founded The Journal of Open Source Education, and is its Editor-in-Chief.

Prof. Barba is a recipient of the 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Award for Open Social Sciences. She was nominated and received an Honorable Mention in the 2017 Open Education Awards for Excellence of the Open Education Consortium.