She completed her Ph.D. in 1987 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; her dissertation Ab initio Statistical Mechanics of Structural Phase Transitions was supervised by John Joannopoulos.
[10] Rabe won the David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics for 2008 "for research, writings and presentations on the theory of structural phase transitions and for the application of first-principles electronic structure methods to the understanding of technologically important phenomena in ferroelectrics".
Such systems include ferroelectrics,[13] antiferroelectrics, piezoelectrics, high-k dielectrics, multiferroics, shape-memory compounds, magnetic and nonmagnetic martensites.
These materials exhibit properties which support a wide range of technological applications, including information and energy storage and conversion.
[14] Rabe’s research has also examined the effects of epitaxial strain and the properties of interfaces in thin films, superlattices,[15] and other artificially structured systems.