She completed her PhD in Biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Fulbright Fellow. She was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich. In 2016, she was granted an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, which allows her to pursue high-risk high-reward research developing tags for cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), and developing new technological and computational techniques to advance structural cell biology. In 2017, she was named a Pew Scholar.