Nahrstedt earned a diploma in mathematics from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1984, and a master's degree in numerical analysis from Humboldt University in 1985.[1] She earned a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania in 1995, under the supervision of Jonathan M. Smith.[2] She was editor-in-chief of the journal Multimedia Systems (ACM and Springer) from 2000 to 2006,[1] and chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia from 2007 to 2013.[3][4]
In 2012 Nahrstedt was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to quality-of-service management for distributed multimedia systems."[5][4] She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers[6]
for contributions to end-to-end quality of service management of multimedia systems, and a winner of a 2012 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award "for pioneering contributions to end-to-end quality of service and resource management in wired and wireless networks".[3] In 2013 she became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.[7][8] In 2022, she was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering.[9]