Before joining WPI, she was a postdoctoral researcher at École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University. Her research in mathematical biology is aimed at understanding how animals shape themselves. From ants to elephants, animals come in all shapes and sizes, and she says it is interesting and important to know how growth and forces are patterned and how they interplay in forming these shapes. To answer these questions, she develops mathematical and computational models of growth and explores how to infer the forces at play in living tissue based on imaging data. She earned a PhD in mathematics at the University of California, Irvine.