[3] As an immigrant at the age of 12,[4] Persad started doing research under mentor Eleanor F. Helin at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, in Asteroid Discovery, Origin, and Motion, and at the age of 13, she was a research assistant at the High-temperature Superconductivity Lab at Boston University.

[8] She was subsequently recruited by Princeton University, where she worked as research assistant under John N. Bahcall at the Institute for Advanced Study on Hubble Space Telescope Data Analysis of Quasar Spectrum Emission.

[10] She was awarded citations by Ted Kennedy of the United States Senate and Hazel R. O'Leary of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Seeing a gap in the availability of data for these industries, she went on to develop short, medium and long-range weather prediction systems which were peer-reviewed among academia and U.S. Department of Defense scientists and rigorously tested for the top meteorological broadcasting station in the Midwest.

[12] Her mathematical and scientific areas of interest have been in Space Physics and Defense Systems, Orbital Dynamics, Geospace and Climatology, Computational Modeling, and Predictive Analytics.

[13] In 2009, Persad founded StatWeather, a weather and climate services corporation specializing in the novel application of Bayesian neural networks and artificial intelligence to automated forecasting systems.

The results of this method came to attention of Platts and Energy Risk, winning StatWeather the 2013 Newcomer of the Year Award and ranking as a top global provider in the Weather Data Management category of Energy Risk Software Rankings.

Forbes, in an article on the future of innovation, reported that StatWeather "has managed to double the accuracy of weather forecasts.".

She also studied pipe organ, early instruments, and voice while in high school and college.

[24] Persad has released an all-Yamaha CD Solace (2011), a historical journey through 250 years of lyrical classical music with some recordings from rare manuscripts never before commercially available.