She continued at Rice University for graduate study, earning a master's degree in 1977 and completing her Ph.D. in 1979.
[2] Her doctoral dissertation, Adaptive Nonlinear Image Restoration by a Modified Kalman Filtering Approach, was supervised by Rui de Figueiredo.
[4] She remained there for 27 years until moving in 2007 to Mississippi State University as chair of the electrical and computer engineering department and James Worth Bagley Chair of Engineering.
[8] Rajala was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2001, "for contributions to engineering education".
[13] She won the 2017 IEEE Award for Meritorious Achievement in Accreditation Activities, and is the 2020 winner of the Sharon Keillor Award for Women in Engineering Education of the American Society for Engineering Education.