She hails from Dartmouth College, where she majored in Computer Science and Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her interest in the intersection of technology and society led her to conduct research with Hany Farid, Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor of Computer Science. Her resulting honors thesis, titled “The Accuracy, Fairness, and Limits of Predicting Recidivism,” in which she demonstrated how technology and racial bias affect the prediction of recidivism, received widespread media attention. In 2018, Dressel was invited by Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society to discuss her research.