text: Khalil attended Colgate University, where she majored in chemistry and English and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for doctoral research, where she developed coherent two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy to study the molecular structure of coupled vibrations on a picosecond timescale. Khalil moved to the University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher, where she was made a Miller Fellow.