Dr Fabiana Santana has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Software Engineering and Digital Systems), a M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics, a Bachelor of Computer Science and is a specialist in Process and Project Management.

Her research is focused on software engineering, information systems, enterprise architecture, and computer science and engineering applied to multi-disciplinary research, such as biodiversity conservation and climate change. New areas of interest are project and change management, big data, cloud computing and virtual laboratories, and business process design, improvement and management, as well as innovation and sustainability in IT.

Dr Santana is the author of numerous papers, two of them ranked in the Science Direct 25 Top Hottest Articles in the multi-disciplinary research area of Computer Science applied to Ecology (a.k.a. Ecological Informatics), and has participated in a number of international research projects during her career. She is currently a member of the scientific committee of the BCCVL research project (Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory - http://www.bccvl.org.au/bccvl/), a partnership with Griffith University, and is working with other researchers and research groups worldwide, including interdisciplinary collaborations with the NCI (National Computational Infrastructure at the ANU), CSIRO and Geoscience Australia, in Australia.

Prior to her career in Australia, she was a tenured senior lecturer at the Federal University of ABC (Sao Paulo, Brazil) from 2009 to 2014, where she was also the chief of the IT and Strategic Intelligence area at the university's Innovation Agency, the head of the Computer Science group and the coordinator of the Bachelor of Computer Science course. She was a member of the Committee of Ethics in Research and the NUVEM and BioComp research centres. She collaborated with the University of Sao Paulo in research and post-graduation projects during the same period, and worked as a part-time Lecturer from 1999 to 2009 at the Industrial Engineering College (Sao Paulo, Brazil) in the Information Systems, Computer Science and Engineering areas, teaching mostly undergraduate courses.In additional to her career in the academia, she also had a professional career in IT and business prior to joining the University of Canberra. She was a partner at Idex Industrial and Plastic Systems in Brazil until 2013, a start-up that she helped to found in 2000 and that is now a successful company in the chemical industry (plastics) and she had 10+ years of experience as a senior IT manager, program manager and senior project manager, having worked in the financial and transports industries, as well as in research focused organisations. Among others, she worked for Alstom Transports and ABN AMRO Bank (Sudameris) in Brazil and, more recently, for the NCI. She started her career as a systems engineer, developing Internet, control and communication systems, and has a broad experience in Agile and Waterfall system development from the academic, practical and management perspectives.

Research interests

• Software Engineering
• Data Science / Data Analytics
• Computer Science and Engineering applied to Multi-disciplinary Research