Emilie Ringe earned her B.A./M.S. summa cum laude in chemistry, then Ph.D. in chemistry and materials science at Northwestern University in 2012. She became the Gott Research Fellow at Trinity Hall as well as a Newton International Research Fellow (Royal Society) in the Electron Microscopy group in the Materials Science and Metallurgy Department at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2014, she was hired as an assistant professor at Rice University, where she established the Electron Microscopy Center and received funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (YIP), NSF, ACR-PRF, 3M, and the US/Israel Binational Science Foundation.

In 2018, she moved to England to take up a lectureship in multi-scale, multi-dimensional imaging of natural and synthetic materials at the University of Cambridge, joint between the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy and the Department of Earth Sciences. She received an ERC Starting grant (1.6M Euros) to pursue her studies of Earth-abundant plasmonics. She has been elected fellow of Gonville & Caius College, is an associate member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and serves on the editorial board of Materials Chemistry Frontiers.