She earned her BS from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her MS and PhD from the California Institute of Technology. She joined Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in 2003, and received an NSF CAREER award in 2004. Her research program is dedicated to understanding, modeling, and engineering the self-assembly of atoms and small molecules to create larger scale structures and complex functionality. Her approach draws on process systems engineering, combining modeling and experiments in applications including surface deposition, fluid-phase crystallization, polymer reaction engineering, and neural cultures. She is a member of the NSF Center for Chemical Evolution and the Georgia Tech Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics.