She holds a B.S. (with honors), M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, as well as an M.A. degree in Statistics, all from the University of California, Berkeley. She received the 2007 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for the most outstanding doctoral research in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. She is a Hellman Fellow at UCLA and in 2012 she received NSF CAREER award. Prior to joining UCLA, she was a postdoctoral researcher with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests span coding and information theory, graphical models, statistical algorithms, and computational methods, with applications to emerging systems for data storage, processing, and communication