When D'Souza was younger she faced the personal choice of going to college or moving to Paris to become a fashion designer.

[2] She earned her doctoral degree in theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1999, where she worked with Mehran Kardar and Norman Margolus.

[4][5] The percolation transition can be applied to a variety of real-world systems, from nanotubes to epileptic seizures or social networks.

[8][9] She has also studied cascading behaviours in general, including power-grid failures, crashes in financial markets and spreads of political movements.

She was a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences several times and previously served on the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council of Complex Systems.