She is the co-director of the Laboratory for the Study of Applied Language Technologies and Society, and a graduate faculty in the department of Computer Science. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2006. Before coming to Rutgers she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on computational models for language understanding and learning, with applications to health informatics, human-computer instruction, and computational social science. Her research is funded primarily by NSF and DARPA.