Maria Garcia de la Banda

Maria Garcia de la Banda is a distinguished Professor at Monash University's Faculty of Information Technology, where she serves in the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI). With over 25 years of academic experience, she has held significant leadership roles including Deputy Dean (Research) until July 2022, overall Deputy Dean of the Faculty (2013-2016), and Head of the Caulfield School of Information Technology (2009-2011). She is currently a member of the ARC College of Experts and Co-Chair of the Monash-Woodside FutureLab.

Her educational background includes a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (awarded July 7, 1994) and an Ingeniero Informatico degree from the same institution (awarded March 1, 1992). Her PhD received the university's Best PhD Award.

Garcia de la Banda's research spans multiple disciplines with a strong focus on constraint programming, combinatorial optimization, program analysis, and bioinformatics. She leads the Optimization research group within DSAI and has made significant contributions to declarative programming languages, parallelism, and automatic parallelization. Her interdisciplinary work bridges computer science with biological applications, particularly in protein structure analysis and computational drug design.

Her publication record shows consistent contributions across constraint programming, optimization, and bioinformatics. Recent work demonstrates increasing interdisciplinary collaboration, with a notable expansion into bioinformatics applications alongside her core constraint programming research. She has maintained a strong presence at major conferences like CP (International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming) while also building impactful industry collaborations.

Her scientific recognition includes:

• Logan Fellowship (1997) - the first and only prestigious award of its kind in the Faculty of IT
• International Constraint Modelling Challenge winner (2005, with Peter Stuckey)
• Universidad Politecnica de Madrid's Best PhD Award (1994)
• Induction into the Monash Honour Roll (2021)
• Vice-Chancellor's Diversity and Inclusion Award (2020)

As a research leader, Garcia de la Banda has secured over $20M in industry funding and $14M in nationally competitive funding, including $8M as Chief Investigator in 11 ARC grants (5 as lead). She has served as Area Editor of the Journal of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming since 2010 and on the Editorial Board of the Constraints journal since 2019. Her leadership extends to professional organizations, having served on the Executive Committees of both the Association of Logic Programming (2005-2008) and the Association of Constraint Programming (2017-2020), where she was President (2019-2020).

She leads the Optimization research group within DSAI and collaborates extensively across Monash University and with industry partners. Her current major projects include HARNESS (Hierarchical Abstractions and Reasoning for Neuro-Symbolic Systems), the ARC Training Centre in Optimisation Technologies, and the Building 4.0 CRC project focused on better buildings through technology. These initiatives demonstrate her commitment to translating theoretical research into practical applications with real-world impact.