She is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan.
[1] Mao was both an undergraduate and a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science in 2003.
[5] She has also found performance degradation caused by network security software,[6] discovered defects in the sandbox used to keep Android apps secure from each other,[7] and developed techniques by which self-driving vehicles can be tricked into failing to observe obstacles.
[8] Mao was the 2016–2017 recipient of the George J. Huebner Jr. Research Excellence Award of the University of Michigan College of Engineering.
[9] She was named as an IEEE Fellow in 2022, "for contributions to performance and security of internet routing and mobile systems".