PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Oana Balmau

Oana Balmau is a computer systems researcher whose work on storage and data management supports machine learning workloads. After bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science at EPFL, she completed a PhD at the University of Sydney under Willy Zwaenepoel; her SILK key-value store won Best Paper at USENIX ATC in 2019, and her dissertation received the 2021 CORE John Makepeace Bennett Award and an honorable mention for the SIGOPS Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award. She joined McGill University in January 2021, co-founded the MLPerf Storage benchmark, and co-authored Falcon, a Best Paper winner at the 2024 ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing. Recent papers such as MinatoLoader and HarMoEny target faster ML training and MoE model inference. She is an assistant professor at McGill, where she leads the DISCS Lab, and an associate academic member of Mila.

Now at
School of Computer Science, McGill University, Mila and University of Toronto

Timeline

  1. By 2019

    EPFL degrees and a Sydney PhD

    She earns bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science at EPFL in Switzerland. By 2019, she is at the University of Sydney, where Willy Zwaenepoel advises her PhD.

  2. 2019

    SILK wins best paper

    In 2019, she is first author of SILK, a RocksDB-derived key-value store with an I/O scheduler that reaches up to two orders of magnitude lower 99th percentile latencies than RocksDB and TRIAD. The paper, written with Zwaenepoel and colleagues from Nutanix and IBM Research–Zurich, wins Best Paper at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

  3. January 2021

    Assistant professor at McGill

    She joins McGill's School of Computer Science in January 2021 as an assistant professor.

  4. 2021

    Two dissertation honours

    In 2021, her Sydney dissertation, Redesigning Persistent Key-Value Stores for Future Workloads, Hardware, and Performance Requirements, wins the CORE John Makepeace Bennett Award for the best computer science dissertation in Australia and New Zealand. It also earns an honorable mention for the ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.

  5. 2023

    Co-founding MLPerf Storage

    Within MLCommons, she co-founds MLPerf Storage, an open-source benchmark for storage on ML workloads. As Storage Working Group co-chair, she reports in September 2023 that the first round has over 28 performance results from five companies.

  6. 2024

    Falcon wins best paper

    She co-authors Falcon: Live Reconfiguration for Stateful Stream Processing on the Edge, which wins the Best Paper Award at the ninth ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing, held in Rome in December 2024.

  7. 2025–2026

    Data loading and MoE inference

    In 2025, she co-authors MinatoLoader, a PyTorch data loader that builds batches by prioritizing fast-to-preprocess samples so GPUs sit idle less. In 2026, she co-authors HarMoEny, on efficient inference of MoE models, which appears at the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.

  8. As of October 2026

    Leading McGill's DISCS Lab

    She is an assistant professor in McGill's School of Computer Science, where she leads the DISCS Lab, and an associate academic member of Mila. She also holds a status-only appointment in computer science at the University of Toronto, and her research focuses on storage systems and data management for ML, data science, and edge computing workloads.

Career

  1. Since 2021McGill UniversityAssistant professor
  2. NowSchool of Computer Science, McGill UniversityLead
  3. NowMilaAssociate academic member
  4. NowUniversity of TorontoStatus-only appointment in computer science
  5. From 2023MLCommonsStorage Working Group co-chair

Education

  1. EPFLBachelor's degree in computer science
  2. University of SydneyPhD

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Oana Balmau. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of Toronto. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorateIncludes University of Toronto. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorate. Across 2,116 people with both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate recorded, we trace which undergraduate schools feed which doctoral programs, how often students stay at the same school, and how paths differ by birth-country region.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes McGill University. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Oana Balmau yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. 2021 Invited Speakers acsw.core.edu.au. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. SILK: Preventing Latency Spikes in Log-Structured Merge Key-Value Stores | USENIX usenix.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Oana Balmau | Mila mila.quebec. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Prof. Oana Balmau receives SIGOPS distinction cs.mcgill.ca. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. The Dennis M. Ritchie Thesis Award 2021 sigops.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. 5 minutes with Oana Balmau sydney.edu.au. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. MLCommons publishes storage benchmark for AI blocksandfiles.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. SEC 2024 | 9th ACM/ IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing cyprusconferences.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. MinatoLoader: Accelerating Machine Learning Training Through Efficient Data Preprocessing arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.