[3] While attending Rutgers University for her bachelor's degree, she met her future husband Michael David Gadarian, whom she married in 2005.
[4] She spent one year there before accepting a three-year fellowship as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation scholar in health policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
[4] She earned a Norway Research Council grant to conduct a long-term study of the effect of terrorism on social capital.
[6] In the same year, she received the Society for Political Methodology's Harold F. Gosnell Prize with seven other scientists for their project titled Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses with Applications to Experiments.
[13] In 2021, Gadarian was named a Carnegie Fellow,[14] promoted to full professor,[15] and appointed Chair of the Department of Political Science at the Maxwell School.