Eilaf holds a joint appointment in the Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering and the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Washington in 2011 under the guidance of Samson A. Jenekhe. Her graduate work focused on the design and synthesis of macromolecules, elucidating structure–property relationships and engineering the next generation, high–performance, low–cost organic electronics including field–effect transistors, light–emitting diodes, and photovoltaics. Eilaf then joined the laboratory of Timothy M. Swager at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow and developed a new platform of multicomponent conjugated polymer nanoparticles for in vivo imaging and target-specific drug delivery for early diagnostics and treatments of cancer. Eilaf started her academic career at Emory University in the department of Chemistry and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University in August 2014.  Eilaf joined Rice University in August 2017.