Much of her work, including her PhD thesis,[1] concerns model structures and more recently the foundations of infinity-categories.

[8] Riehl attended Harvard University as an undergraduate; with Benedict Gross as a mentor, she wrote a senior thesis on local class field theory.

[4] She defended her doctoral dissertation, Algebraic model structures, at the University of Chicago in 2011, supervised by J. Peter May.

[11][12] Along with Benedict Gross and Joe Harris, she developed a Harvard course on edX titled "Fat Chance: Probability from the Ground Up".

[18] Riehl is a host of the n-Category Café, a blog on subjects related to category theory in mathematics, physics, and philosophy.