Jelena Diakonikolas is a Postdoctoral Associate at Boston University. She completed her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. Her research interests include large-scale optimization with a focus on first-order methods and their applications in engineered and networked systems. She is the recipient of a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship (2018), the Morton B. Friedman Prize for Excellence at Columbia Engineering (2017), and a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2015). In 2016, she was featured on the inaugural N^2 Women list of "10 Women in Networking/Communications That You Should Watch."