She is also on the faculty of Northeastern's Network Science Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, Eliassi-Rad was an associate professor of computer science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. Before that she was a member of technical staff and principal investigator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. Her research is rooted in data mining and machine learning and spans theory, algorithms and applications of massive data from networked representations of physical and social phenomena. Eliassi-Rad earned a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, WI.