Among her most significant results are the proofs of Gopakumar-Vafa conjectures (joint with Thomas H. Parker et.
al.), and the proof of Getzler's conjecture, asserting vanishing in codimension at least g of the tautological ring of the moduli space of genus-g curves.
[2] She is the daughter of Adrian Ionel, a professor at the Ion Ionescu de la Brad University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Iași.
[1][4] After postdoctoral research at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California and a position as C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty in 1998, and moved to Stanford in 2004.
[1] She was selected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the 2020 Class, for "contributions to symplectic geometry and the geometric analysis approach to Gromov–Witten Theory".