Bala's primary research field is Space Weather Predictions and currently working on prediction methods for ambient solar wind structure and solar energetic particle (SEP) events using physics-based/empirical models and Machine Learning techniques.
Bala earned her Ph. D. in Physics from the University of Kerala, India. After a few postdoctoral positions in Taiwan, Mexico City, Bell Labs and NJIT where she carried out studies on Local Helioseismology, Solar Wind, Solar Radio Bursts and Microflares, she joined Stanford University in 2002 to work on Space Weather Prediction and related topics.
Bala moved to Boulder in 2011 to join Southwest Research Institute where she worked on modeling and extraction of on-orbit point spread functions for the SDO/AIA telescopes and computer vision. She participated in the NASA Frontier Development Lab 2017 as a member of the Solar Terrestrial Interactions team.
She is a Research Scientist at the University of New Hampshire since 2019.
Bala became an affiliate of SSI in 2011 and continues till present. She lives in Boulder, CO, with her family.