As a child, she attended Huron High School (class of 1981) and went on to graduate from the University of Michigan with a BSE in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1985).
Following that, she received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (1990), under the supervision of Manuel Blum.
In 2004, she joined as a full professor in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
This research has practical applications in fields such as data mining, machine learning, and computer vision, as well as in network and system security.
These algorithms are particularly useful for large-scale data analysis, where processing the entire input may be prohibitively expensive in terms of time and resources.