Her dissertation, "Programmable Self-Assembly using Biologically-Inspired Local Interactions and Origami Mathematics", was supervised by Gerald Sussman and Harold Abelson.
[5] From 2012 to 2019, she served as the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard SEAS, where she headed the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group.
It studies bio-inspired algorithms, programming paradigms, and hardware designs for swarm/modular robotic systems and smart materials, drawing inspiration mainly from social insects and multicellular biology.
Her group works in close collaboration with biologists, and currently studies growth and pattern formation in the fruit fly wing.
Nagpal has held the following positions as a researcher and an academic: During her time as Radcliffe Fellow, she worked with experimental biologists to develop a better understanding of collective intelligence in social insects through the application of computer science.