She was interested in art when she was at middle school, but shifted her focus to chemistry during her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
[2] Tran then worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with polymer chemist Ron Zuckerman.
[2] Tran was a graduate student at Columbia University, where she worked alongside Luis Campos on hierarchical ordering in block co-polymer systems.
[citation needed] After earning her doctorate, she moved to Stanford University, where she worked under the supervision of Zhenan Bao.
[2] She has studied peptide-like polymers, 'peptoids', which undergo self-assembly to form useful nanomaterials.