Samantha is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Jose Carmena's lab at the University of California, Berkeley.  Her current research falls in the areas of neuroengineering, computational models and information theory.  

She received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Rice University in May 2014 under the advisement of Dr. Behnaam Aazhang and Dr. Caleb Kemere, and was awarded the ECE Best Thesis Award for her dissertation.    

In addition to her research, Samantha is the former President and co-founder of Electrical XOR Computer Engineering Leaders (ExCEL) at Rice, which is a graudate student group for women in the ECE Department.  She is a member of the Empowering Leadership Alliance (ELA) and formerly held a position on their Student Advisory Board.  Additionally she previously served on the Student Subcommittee of the IT Society.