After she got her Ph.D. from Caltech in Computer Science, Zehra worked at Bell Labs and Siemens Corporate Research. In academia, she has been teaching graduate level Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition courses to tens of students each year and has supervised 6 Ph.D. and 21 M.Sc. theses. She has 18 patents and over 100 publications on theory of machine learning and its applications in finance, health, energy and transportation.