Alex was raised in California and received her B.S. in Chemistry in 2017 from the University of California, Berkeley. She carried out graduate research in synthetic inorganic chemistry with Prof. Daniel Suess at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for which she received her Ph.D. in 2023. She then moved to Princeton University for an Arnold O. Beckman postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Todd Hyster to study organic chemistry and biocatalysis.

In 2026 she returned to UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry.