A lecturer in Feminist Studies, Philosophy and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for Humanities. Barad is the co-director of the postgraduate training programme in science and justice at the UCSC.

She is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), a study where she makes an in-depth development of her concept and theoretical proposal of agential realism. Her works are committed to the study of science, technology and gender, and tackle such questions as ontology and the nature-culture relationship through a new theoretical conceptualisation. Barad has also written numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, post-structuralist theory and feminist theory.