She earned her Ph.D. in astronomy at UCLA in 2009 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Toronto before joining the faculty at UCSD in 2015. Karin Sandstrom is an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego, and an astrophysicist who studies the interstellar medium and star formation in nearby galaxies through multi-wavelength observations. She earned her Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009, and has been a Marie Curie Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.