I am originally from Romania, and graduated from Universitatea Politehnica Bucuresti. Romanian is a romance language, and Romanian culture is very much latin. I grew up during Romania's socialist regime, reading lots of books and dreaming about a time when I could eat as many bananas as I wanted (they were rationed). My grandparents lived in a small village 100km from Bucharest. I came to the US for graduate school and afterwards decided to stay for a couple more years. This has been many years ago.
I am married
to Vinay
Kanitkar who works for Akamai
Technologies, in Cambridge, which was founded in 1998 by an
algorithms professor at MIT and his grad student.
We love to joke about being cache-efficient,
spatially coherent and, of course, cash-oblivious.
We have two kids, Ana and Tommy. At the moment Tommy wants to be a
mathematician musician and Ana wants to be a soccer player scientist who works to protect animals.
We are a multi-cultural family: our families live in the USA, Romania, India, France and Switzerland. My sister Roxana Toma is a professor at SUNY Empire State College. In a previous life, I used to dance Argentine tango and travel every time I got a chance.