Previously, she was research faculty at the Center for Computational Learning Systems, at Columbia University. She did a postdoc in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and completed her PhD and Masters in Computer Science, at MIT. She holds a Bachelors in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard. Her research focuses on machine learning algorithms and theory for problems including learning from data streams, learning from raw (unlabeled) data, learning from private data, and climate informatics: accelerating discovery in climate science with machine learning. Her work on climate informatics received the Best Application Paper Award at NASA CIDU 2010. In 2011, she co-founded the International Workshop on Climate Informatics, which is now in its fifth year, attracting climate scientists and data scientists from over 16 countries and 28 states.