Wickelgren was one of the finalists in the 1999 Intel Science Talent Search.

[1] She majored in mathematics at Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 2003.

After a year at the École normale supérieure (Paris),[2] she went to Stanford University for doctoral study in mathematics, completing her Ph.D. in 2009.

Her dissertation, Lower Central Series Obstructions To Homotopy Sections of Curves Over Number Fields, was supervised by Gunnar Carlsson.

[2][3] She returned to Harvard as a five-year postdoctoral research fellow, funded by the American Institute of Mathematics, and in 2013 became an assistant professor at Georgia Tech.