Her research interests include theory and methodology in spatial statistics, Bayesian statistics and inference for complex systems, design and analysis of computer experiments, nonparametric function estimation, methods for large data sets, and applications in climate and the environment. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Kaufman was a postdoc at SAMSI and at the Geophysical Statistics Project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. She received her PhD in 2006 from the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a member of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center.