She is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She received her B.S. in materials science and engineering from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in materials science from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Before MIT, she spent several years at the Santa Fe Institute as an Omidyar Fellow, and at Columbia University as an Earth Institute Fellow. She has also worked for the United Nations, and as an advisor to the private sector on investment in low-carbon energy technologies. Her research group works on accelerating the discovery and scaling of new energy technologies.