She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland College Park, and then spent a couple of years at the AT&T Shannon Labs as a senior researcher before joining UMass Amherst in 2014. Her research interests are in algorithm design and analysis, and large scale data analytics. She particularly likes to work on problems that are tied to core applications but have the potentials to lead to beautiful theory. She is the recipient of Yahoo ACE Award (2015), Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship (2015), NSF CRII Award (2015), Dean's Dissertation Fellowship (2011), and the best paper award and finalists for best papers at VLDB 2009 and IEEE ICDE 2012 respectively.