Maria Carla Calzarossa is a professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Pavia and the Director of the Performance Evaluation lab at Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering.

She has been a Visiting Scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and at Duke University. She has been Deputy Director of the Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering and Coordinator of the Ph.D. program in Informatics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Pavia. She is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM as well as an elected member in IFIP WG 7.3 and the Italian representative in the IFIP WG 7 "System Modelling and Optimization" .

She has been the Principal Investigator of the FIRB-Perf project "Performance Analysis of Complex Systems", funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and involving 15 Italian Universities. She has been the chairperson of the Working Group of the Observatory of ICT certifications in Italian Universities and High Schools.

She is an Associate Editor of ACM Computing Surveys and Performance Evaluation (Elsevier). She is Program Committee Co-Chair of IEEE MASCOTS 2024 and Track Co-Chair of ACM CCGRID'24. She regularly serves in the Program Committee of top tier conferences. She has been guest editor of special issues of international journals. In 2015 she received a "Best Paper Award" at IEEE/ACM ASONAM Conference.

Her research interests include performance evaluation and workload characterization of complex systems and services, social networks, cloud/fog computing, benchmarking, analysis and debugging of parallel applications.