Yousra studied Mathematics and Computational Statistics. She did a PhD in Statistical Learning followed by a post-doc both at EPFL, where she developed empirical Bayes methods for automatic L2 regularization problems in smooth regression for big data. Before joining SDSC, she worked at SIB/UNIL, where she developed a statistical optimization solution to the parent-of-origin identification problem in human genetics. Her technical expertise includes supervised learning, numerical optimization for machine learning, statistical modeling and methodology, high-performance and distributed computing for big data, Bayesian computation and time series analysis. She worked on applied problems in quantitative finance and environmental sciences.