Dr. Laxmi Parida is a Distinguished Research Scientist and heads Computational Genomics at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. She is a visiting professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York. She is the currently leading the science teams in cancer genomics, Alzheimer's and bioinformatics in the "Sequence the Food Supply Chain Consortium" across multiple IBM labs in different geographies. Over the last 10 years, Dr. Parida also led the IBM Science team in the Cacao Consortium (with MARS, USDA) and the Genographic Project with National Geographic.

Her research areas include population genomics, cancer genomics, plant genomics, bioinformatics algorithms and topological data analysis. She is on the advisory board of the NYU Engineering School and the editorial boards of BMC Bioinformatics and the Journal of Computational Biology and an associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and the SIAM Journal of Discrete Mathematics.