Techet grew up as a sailor and diver in coastal North Carolina. She studied mechanical and aerospace engineering at
Princeton University, graduating in 1995. She then studied oceanographic engineering through a joint graduate program between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, earning a master's degree in 1998 and completing her Ph.D. in 2001. Her research aims to address the long standing hydrodynamic problems that are being faced by the ocean science and engineering community and by the United States Navy After postdoctoral research at Princeton, she returned to MIT as Doherty Assistant Professor of Ocean Utilization in the department of ocean engineering. In 2005 she became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, as part of a broader merger of MIT's ocean engineering and mechanical engineering departments. She was promoted to full professor in 2019. Techet is a director of the EHL which is known as Experimental hydrodynamics Laboratory at MIT. ==Contributions==