She is a professor at Northwestern University and the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA).

She attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for graduate school, where she completed her PhD in astronomy in 1997.

She joined the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian as a CfA postdoctoral fellow and was awarded the Clay Fellowship in 2000.

Her current research covers[2] a range a topics in theoretical astrophysics, including the study of gravitational waves detected by LIGO, the development of models for X-ray binaries, LSST, and predicting the progenitors of supernovae.

[3] In the 2022–25 cycle, Kalogera served as the vice president of the board of the Aspen Center for Physics.