She received a B.S. in mathematics and a J.D. from Yale. Her research interests include privacy law, the legal profession, and empirical legal studies. She previously served as the Director of Project SEAPHE (Scale and Effects of Admissions Preferences in Higher Education) at UCLA School of Law, where she conducted peer-reviewed research on admissions, academic performance, and labour outcomes for law school applicants. Professor Yakowitz has negotiated complex public records disclosures and has prepared large de-identified databases for public research use. These experiences inform her research on data privacy law. In her recent article (forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology), Professor Yakowitz argues that the risk of re-identification from properly anonymized research data is trivial, and easily outweighed by the social utility of freely accessible data.