Prior to this, she spent 2009-2011 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Mathematics and Statistics departments at Stanford University. She received her B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Nevada and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include Compressed Sensing, Randomized Algorithms, Functional Analysis, Computational Mathematics, Probability, and Statistics. Prof. Needell has been the recipient of awards including the Simons Foundation Collaboration grant, 2012 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, ScienceWatch Fast-Breaking paper award, Nevada Alumni of the Year Award, ICERM Research fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER award.