Badia earned a degree in computer science from the
Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in 1989, and continued at UPC for a Ph.D., which she completed in 1994, under the direction of
Jordi Cortadella. She worked at UPC as a lecturer in
computer architecture from 1989 to 1997, and then as an associate professor from 1997 to 2008. Badia's early work concerned
electronic design automation. While working at UPC, she became a researcher at the European Center of Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA) beginning in 1999, through which her interests shifted to parallel computing. In 2005 she became manager of the workflows and distributed computing group in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the successor project to CEPBA. She became a researcher for the Spanish National Research Council in 2008, also continuing to lecture at the UPC as a part-time associate professor since 2011. ==Recognition==