Silvia D. Olabarriaga was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil. She graduated in Informatics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS, Brazil) in 1982. After working two years in the Brazilian computer industry (EDISA) as a software engineer, she went back to Informatics at UFRGS to obtain a Master's degree Computer Graphics. Her dissertation was about 3D computer animation (1987), which remained her main reseach topic at INESC, Lisbon (1988-1989) and as a lecturer at the Informatics Institute at UFRGS (1990-2002). From 1994 on, her interests moved into Scientific Visualization and Image Processing, with focus on medical applications. She obtained a PhD in Computer Science in 1999, at the [[http://www.science.uva.nl/research/isla/][Intelligent Sensorial Information Systems] at the University of Amsterdam, NL, with the thesis Human-Computer Interaction for the Segmentation of Medical Images. From April 2002 until February 2005 she worked as a research fellow at the Image Sciences Institutes, UMC-Utrecht, NL, in medical image segmentation (CT). In March 2005 she joined the Virtual Laboratory for e-Sciences project at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam. Her main interests since then include the development, usage and evaluation of grid technology to enable and enhance advanced biomedical research applications (e-Science).
In 2007 Silvia moved to the Academic Medical Center and became leader of the Medical Diagnosis and Imaging subprogram (SP1.3) of the VL-e project. In May 2008 she joined the Bioinformatics Laboratory as a post doctoral fellow. Silvia is currently assistant professor at the Bioinformatics Laboratory of the Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics (KEBB) of the AMC and leads the e-Bioscience group.