Rita Hartel is a research associate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Paderborn. She received her PhD in 2008 in the area of efficient processing of compressed XML. Her research is focussed to the areas of access control and data security for XML, efficient XML query evaluation, XML compression, processing, transformation and modification of compressed XML, and text compression. Rita Hartel has published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles in international scientific journals, conferences and workshops.