[1] Rexford did her undergraduate studies at Princeton, earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1991, and then moved to the University of Michigan for graduate studies in computer science and engineering, earning a master's degree in 1993 and a doctorate in 1996.
Her thesis, titled "Tailoring router architectures to performance requirements in cut-through networks", was supervised by Kang G. Shin.
[1] Rexford won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (the award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or service contribution at or before age 35) in 2005, for her work on introducing network routing subject to the different business interests of the operators of different subnetworks into Border Gateway Protocol.
[1][2] In 2016, Rexford was named the recipient of the ACM Athena Lecturer award,[3] which recognizes women who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.
[5] Rexford was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2014 for contributions to the operational stability of large computer networks.