Leila De Floriani is a  professor at the Department of Geographical Sciences and at UMIACS,  and  is affiliated with  the Center for Geospatial Information Science  and with the Department of Computer Science. She has  previously been a professor of Computer Science at the University of Genova (Italy), where she has been the Director of the PhD Program in Computer Science  for eight years. She has also held positions at the Italian National Research Council, at the University of Nebraska, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and at the University of Maryland.

Leila De Floriani has written over 300 publications in the fields of  visualization, geographic data processing, geometric modeling, shape and image analysis,  which have appeared in major international journals and conferences. The main focus of her current research is in   terrain modeling and analysis, spatial data structures, big data analysis through topological methods, geospatial data visualization, social network analysis.

Leila De Floriani has been the  Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics from 2015 to 2018. She is an Associate Editor of Graphical Models and of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, and a member of the editorial board of GeoInformatica and the Journal of Spatial Information Science (JOSIS).  She served on more then 150 program committees of the major international conferences in the areas of geometric and shape modeling, computer graphics, visualization, and geographic data processing. She has been the principal investigator in several projects funded by the European Community, by the Italian Ministry of Research and Education and by the US National Science Foundation.

She is an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).  She received the Pioneer Award from the Solid Modeling Association in 2017. She is a member of the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors for years 2017-2019.

De Floriani is the 2020 President of the IEEE Computer Society. She is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) as well as a Pioneer of the Solid Modeling Association. She is an IEEE Computer Society Golden Core Member. She has been a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society (CS) in 2017 and 2018. She has been the chair of the 2018 IEEE CS Audit Committee and has served as a vice-chair of the IEEE CS Fellow Nomination Committee in 2017 and 2018. In 2019 she has been the chair of the IEEE CS Planning Committee and of the IEEE CS Constitution and Bylaws Committee.