She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from Saratov University, Russia.Then, she briefly was a researcher at Vernadskii Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Russia. She obtained her Ph.D. in theoretical physical chemistry from Utah State University with Prof. Alexander Boldyrev. She was a Postdoctoral Associate in computational biochemistry at Yale University, with Professor William Jorgensen, and then an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow in biophysics with Prof. John Tully, also at Yale. She joined the UCLA faculty in 2010. The focus of her laboratory is computational and theoretical design and multi-scale description of new materials.