Ioana Popescu is currently Professor of Hydroinformatics at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in Delft, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on computational methods, aspects of flood modeling and vulnerability related to floods, lake and reservoir modeling and water supply systems modeling and optimisation. She is particularly interested in integrating mathematical models into decision support systems. She is a member of several engineering associations and research schools, such as the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research(IAHR), the European Geophysical Union (EGU) and of the SENSE research school.

Prior to joining IHE Delft in 2001, she worked in 2000, as a postdoc researcher at the Institute for Research in Construction of the National Research Council of Canada in the area of rehabilitation of urban infrastructure, where she was involved in the development of a finite element based prediction tool for flexible pavement structures subjected to both environmental and traffic-induced loading.