Louiqa Raschid has made significant contributions towards solving the challenges of data management, data integration, and performance for applications in the life sciences, Web data delivery, health information, financial information systems, humanitarian IT applications and Grid computing. Her research spans the fields of computer science to business information systems to life science data management and she is an expert in optimization and large scale simulation, modeling and semantics and logic based reasoning, and data management and analysis techniques.

Her research on tools for semi-automatic information extraction and mediation from Web accessible sources in the late 1990's was one of the first projects to recognize the importance of these non-traditional information sources. She also initiated projects in 2000 on cost-based semantic query rewriting for Web sources with limited query answering capabilities and developing wide area cost models for efficient query evaluation on the Web. These projects extended traditional database query optimization and evaluation technology to the Web and the cost model was the first to show that time and day variations as well as network topological features could be learned using query feedback and exploited to construct a Catalog and prediction tool to predict access latencies. Both projects are highly cited (among the most cited papers of the VLDB Journal) and were in the vanguard of almost a decade of research as well as system prototype development. The results of this research on wide area optimization and heterogeneous cost mo dels have eventually been incorporated into industrial products such as the IMB DB2 II information integration solution. She has also made significant contributions in query answering and result ranking for the biological Web; customized data delivery in wide area environments and models for pricing resources and scheduling tasks on the computational Grid.

She has published approximately 140 papers in the leading conferences and journals in databases, scientific computing, Web data management, bioinformatics and AI including the ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, AAAI, IEEE ICDE, ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, IEEE ToC, and the Journal of Logic Programming. Her research has received multiple awards including over 25 grants from the NSF and DARPA. Papers that she co-authored have been nominated for or won best paper awards at the 1996 International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, the 1998 International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, the 2008 International Conference on Data Integration in the Life Sciences and Best Student Paper (advisor and co-author), International Conference on Data Engineering, 2009.

She has chaired or served on multiple IEEE and ACM and AAAI program committees and the editorial boards of the VLDB Journal, ACM Computing Surveys, ACM Journal on Data and Information Quality, INFORMS Journal of Computing and IEEE TKDE. She has also organized working groups on information mediation and biological data management for the NIH and DARPA, served as Area Editor for the Springer Encyclopedia on Data Base Systems and has been the editor of 10 special issues in the leading journals. She is co-organizer of an NSF sponsored workshop on Workshop on Knowledge Representation and Information Management for Financial Risk Management in July 2010.

She has advised and mentored over 30 Ph.D. or post-doctoral researchers including many women and minority students has over 100 co-authors or co-editors.

She has played a key role in the Sahana FOSS project for disaster information management including serving as database architect, member of the Sahana Software Foundation, and Founding Chair of the Sahana Board (2007-2009). Sahana is the only comprehensive product for disaster information management. Sahana is an outgrowth of the 2003 tsunami and it has since been deployed for multiple disasters including most recently the 2010 Haiti earthquake. She has been a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM since 2008.