Her research centres on the dual problems of creating robotic technology that can deliver realistic haptic feedback to human users and enabling autonomous robots to understand their haptic interactions with the world. She directs the Penn Haptics Group, which is part of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. She has received several honours for her research, including an NSF CAREER Award in 2009, Popular Science Brilliant 10 in 2010, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Academic Early Career Award in 2012, and many best paper and best demonstration awards. Prior to becoming a professor, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University, and she earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in 2006.