Prior to joining North Carolina State University in 2012, Dr. Battestilli was a network research engineer at the Next Generation Computing Systems at IBM Research. She worked on the PowerEN Technology, a blur between general purpose and networking processors and hardware accelerators. She identified and studied workloads at the edge of the network that required high-throughput and fast deep-packet processing. Since 2012, her research has been focused on Computer Science Education, especially in the area of peer collaboration, scaling techniques for large courses, auto-graders and learning analytics. She is also working on software that can be used for teaching and learning. She is investigating techniques and best practices on broadening participation in Computer Science. Women and minorities need to be more involved in tech innovation as companies and teams perform better when there is diversity. She is also interested in Cloud Networking, Internet Of Things, Software Defined Networks and the design and performance evaluation of networking architectures and protocols, which are areas she worked in while in industry.