Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, she completed her Ph. D. at Northwestern University and post-doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2011, she has received awards including the NSF CAREER Award, the ACS Unilever Award for Outstanding Young Investigator in Colloid and Surfactant Science and the Cottrell Research Scholar Award. She currently serves as an associate editor at Nanoscale, and as an editorial advisory board of ACS Nano. Her group studies the chemical mechanisms underpinning metal nanoparticle synthesis, surface chemistry, and optoelectronic behaviors.