Sylvia Spengler currently serves as the program director for science and engineering information integration and informatics in the Computer Science Directorate of the National Science Foundation.

She was the director of the US Department of Energy (DOE) Human Genome Program field operations and co-director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Comutational Genomics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL). She previously served as deputy director of the LBL Genome Center and was a founder of the Program in Mathematics and Molecular Biology. Her many honors include being named Senior Fellow of the American Cancer Society.

In 2001 she received the Howe Award for service to computational biology, in recognition of her history of designing new programs at the interface of biology, computer science and mathematics. She has also developed informatics and science education programs from the middle school to the postdoctoral level. Her publications range from computer science to mathematics and genomics.