Prof. Deanna Needell earned her PhD from UC Davis before working as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She is currently a full professor of mathematics at UCLA. She has earned many awards including the IEEE Best Young Author award, the Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, an NSF CAREER and NSF BIGDATA award, and the prestigious IMA prize in Applied Mathematics. She is also an AMS Fellow (2022) and an SIAM Fellow (2024). She has been a research professor fellow at several top research institutes including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and Simons Institute in Berkeley. She also serves as associate editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Linear Algebra and its Applications, and the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences as well as on the organizing committee for SIAM sessions and the Association for Women in Mathematics.