Dr. Kappel received her B.S. in Physics from the University of California San Diego, where she worked with Professor Andrew McCammon to study protein dynamics and protein-ligand interactions using computational approaches. She received her Ph.D. in Biophysics from Stanford University, where she focused on developing computational methods to predict RNA structures and RNA-protein interactions with Professor Rhiju Das.

Her graduate work was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Gabilan Stanford Graduate Fellowship. Subsequently, as an HHMI Hanna Gray Postdoctoral Fellow and Schmidt Science Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, she developed and applied a high-throughput experimental approach to characterize the relationships between protein sequences and nuclear condensate formation. Dr. Kappel will join the UCLA faculty in July 2025. Her lab will focus on developing predictive sequence-structure-function models of RNA, proteins, and their interactions by combining high-throughput experiments, machine learning, and computational biophysical methods.