[2] She works as a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin.

[3] Chawla earned a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2000,[1][4] and received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005.

Her dissertation, Graph Algorithms for Planning and Partitioning, was supervised by Avrim Blum.

[5] After postdoctoral studies at Stanford University under the mentorship of Tim Roughgarden,[6] and at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley, she joined the Wisconsin faculty in 2006.[4].

She won a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2009,[7] and was named a Kavli Fellow in 2012.