Rada Mihalcea is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas, where she leads the Language and Information Technologies research group. In 2009, she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, awarded by President Barack Obama. She served on the editorial board of several journals, including Computational Linguistics, the Journal of Natural Language Engineering and Language Resources and Evaluations, and she co-chaired the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference in 2009 and the