[1] She attended Brooklyn Technical High School and was selected to take part in a math and science program for successful women sophomores.

Bell became a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, working in the centre for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology.

[6][7] Bell joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University as an interim assistant research professor.

[1] She works with the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics to develop systems that can control individual ultrasound and photoacoustic components.

[9] She holds a patent in short-lag spatial coherence beamforming,[10] which can be used for photoacoustic image guidance of medical procedures such as skull base surgery[11] or prostate brachytherapy.

[18][19][20] She explored convolutional neural networks that input data and output readable images that are free from artefacts.

Bell is the 2021 winner of the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award, in recognition of her pioneering contributions to photoacoustic imaging for surgical guidance, including innovative technology designs, novel deep learning applications, informative spatial coherence beamforming theory, and visionary clinical possibilities.

[32] In 2024, Bell received the highest honor in the nation to early-career scientists and engineers: the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award.