She went to the University of California, Santa Barbara on a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, and completed her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering in 2000.
Her dissertation, under the name Elizabeth Michelle Royer, was Routing in Ad hoc Mobile Networks: On-Demand and Hierarchical Strategies, and was jointly supervised by P. Michael Melliar-Smith and Louise Moser.
[1] Belding was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2014 for "contributions to mobile and wireless networking and communication protocols".
[4] She was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "contributions to communication in mobile networks and their deployment in developing regions".
[5] One of her publications, on Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing in mobile networks, was selected for the SIGMOBILE Test of Time Award in 2018.