As an undergraduate, she received her BA in chemistry and physics with a secondary concentration in mathematics. As a Hertz Fellow, Monika eventually found the intersection of her interests to lie in quantum mechanics and decided to pursue a PhD in experimental atomic physics at MIT. There, in the laboratory of Professor Vladan Vuletic, she worked towards generating entangled states of an ensemble of laser-cooled atoms. One such state could be applied in an atomic clock to approach the fundamental limit on precision imposed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. After receiving her PhD in 2011, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Ludwig-Maximilian-University (Munich), before arriving at Stanford in the fall of 2013.