[3] While a high school student at Park Tudor School in Indianapolis, Wood (then aged 16) became the first female American to make the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team, receiving silver medals in the 1998 and 1999 International Mathematical Olympiad.

In 2003, Wood graduated from Duke University where she won a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, Fulbright fellowship (declined to accept the Gates Cambridge Scholarship), and a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, in addition to becoming the first American woman and second woman overall to be named a Putnam Fellow in 2002.

She was also named the Deputy Leader of the U.S. team that finished second overall at the 2005 International Mathematical Olympiad.

[9] In 2004, she won the Morgan Prize for work in two topics, Belyi-extending maps and P-orderings, making her the first woman to win this award.

In 2018, she received the AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory from the Association for Women in Mathematics.