Vanessa Frias-Martinez is an associate professor in the iSchool and an affiliate associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. She also leads the Urban Computing Lab at UMD. Frias-Martinez received her doctorate in computer science from Columbia University in 2008.

Frias-Martinez's research areas are data-driven behavioral modeling and spatio-temporal data mining. Her research focuses on the use of large-scale ubiquitous data to model the interplay between human mobility patterns and the built environment; and on more data-centric aspects such as fairness analysis and mitigation for large-scale location datasets. Specifically, Frias-Martinez develops methodologies to fairly model and predict human behaviors in different contexts as well as tools to aid decision makers in areas such as transportation, natural disasters, poverty or urban planning.

Before UMD, she spent five years at Telefonica Research developing algorithms to analyze mobile digital traces. She is also a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award and the La Caixa Fellowship.