Her research interests include human mobility, social and political network dynamics, and computational social science. She has developed computational approaches for mining and visualizing large-scale, time-varying, heterogeneous, multi-relational, and semi-structured data. Her current research focuses on extracting system-level features from big data sets, including social media data and anonymized cellphone records, for studying human and social dynamics, particularly under exogenous events such as emergencies and media events. Her work has appeared in prestigious scientific venues including WWW, SIGKDD, InfoVis, ACM TKDD, ACM TOMCCAP, IEEEP and PLoS ONE.