[2] Rieffel earned her Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Her dissertation, Groups Coarse Quasi-Isometric to the Hyperbolic Plane Cross the Real Line, concerned geometric group theory, and was supervised by Geoffrey Mess.
[3] After working for FX Palo Alto Laboratory, she joined NASA in 2012.
[2] In 2019 she won the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal.
[4] With Wolfgang Polak, Rieffel is the author of the book Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction (MIT Press, 2011).