[1] As a teenager, she also started taking classes at a local community college, accumulating so many units that some of the universities she applied to refused to consider her for freshman admission.

[1] She was Princeton's 2002 valedictorian and became a Rhodes Scholar, repeating two accomplishments of her brother Niles Pierce from nine years earlier.

[2][1] Pierce was one of the first mathematicians to prove nontrivial upper bounds on the number of elements of finite order in an ideal class group.

[8] Pierce won the 2018 Sadosky Prize for research that "spans and connects a broad spectrum of problems ranging from character sums in number theory to singular integral operators in Euclidean spaces" including in particular "a polynomial Carleson theorem for manifolds".

[10] She was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the class of 2021 "for contributions to number theory and harmonic analysis".