She received her Bachelor's degree from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India, and her Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics from Caltech where she worked on multi-scale modeling of materials. She was a postdoctoral scholar at University of California San Diego before joining the University of Houston as an Assistant Professor in 2009. Her research interests focus on atomistic simulations and multi-scale modeling of material response, and elucidating deformation mechanisms in nanostructured materials for novel structural applications. She has been the recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2010), the Bill D. Cook Professorship (UH, 2012-17), Kittinger Teaching Excellence Award (UH, 2016), and the Sia Nemat-Nasser Early Career Award (ASME, 2017).