She received her PhD degree from the Human Computer Interaction Institute at CMU in 2015. She also received a master degree in human computer interaction from CMU in 2012 and received a BA in computer science at Tsinghua University in 2009. Her research combines social science theory, quantitative methods, and computational techniques (machine learning and statistics) to understand the principles underlying large-scale online social systems such as peer production communities (e.g., Wikipedia and StackOverflow), social networking sites (e.g., Facebook), massive online open classes (e.g., Coursera) and sharing economy systems (e.g., Uber, Airbnb and Couchsurfing).