She obtained her S.B. in Chemistry from MIT in 1994 and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000 in the group of A. Paul Alivisatos. Following this, she was a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Media Lab. She joined MIT in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Biological Engineering as a faculty member from 2002-2012. From 2012-2015 she was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Bioengineering Systems and Technologies Group. Since 2015 she has been a founding member of the Mechanical Engineering Program at UMass Boston and holds a visiting scientist position at MIT. She has received an ONR Young Investigator Award, was named a Fellow of the Foresight Institute in 2017.