Plambeck majored in
industrial engineering and mathematics at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, graduating in 1994. After traveling to England as a
Marshall Scholar and earning a master's degree in management studies at the
University of Cambridge and a diploma in economics at the
London School of Economics, she returned to the US for doctoral study in engineering economic systems and operations research at
Stanford University, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2000. Her dissertation,
Dynamic Incentive Problems in Operations Management, was jointly supervised by Stefanos Zenios and . She became an assistant professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2000, affiliated with its program in Operations, Information & Technology. There, she became a full professor in 2005, was named Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor in 2010, and was named Charles A. Holloway Professor in 2015. She also holds an affiliation as professor in Stanford's Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, part of both the
Stanford University School of Engineering and
Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. ==Recognition==