She is a Professor of the Practice at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and co-lead of the MA Program in Learning Engineering.

[12] As of July, 2020, she Kolodner graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in math and computer science from Brandeis University in 1976.

In 1992, Kolodner was elected a fellow in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for "pioneering research on case-based reasoning and learning, including memory organization, information retrieval, problem solving, and knowledge acquisition.

Kolodner's research addresses issues in learning, memory, and problem solving, both in computers and in people.

Kolodner's classic work in this area, Case-based Learning (1993), has been cited thousands of times by researchers.