[1][2] She joined the Smith computer science department in 1994, was given a joint appointment in mathematics in 2005, and became the Charles N. Clark Professor in 2009.

[3] At Smith, Streinu is director of the Biomathematical Sciences Concentration[4][5] and has been the co-PI on a million-dollar grant shared between four schools to support this activity.

[6] In 2006, Streinu won the Grigore Moisil Award of the Romanian Academy for her work with Ciprian Borcea using complex algebraic geometry to show that every minimally rigid graph with fixed edge lengths has at most 4n different embeddings into the Euclidean plane, where n denotes the number of distinct vertices of the graph.

[7][8] In 2010, Streinu won the David P. Robbins Prize of the American Mathematical Society for her combinatorial solution to the carpenter's rule problem.

In this problem, one is given an arbitrary simple polygon with flexible vertices and rigid edges, and must show that it can be manipulated into a convex shape without ever introducing any self-crossings.