Sainath was a student of electrical and engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received a bachelor's degree, a master's degree in 2005, and a Ph.D. in 2009. Her master's thesis was Acoustic Landmark Detection and Segmentation using the McAulay-Quatieri Sinusoidal Model, supervised by Timothy Hazen,[1] and her doctoral dissertation was Applications of Broad Class Knowledge for Noise Robust Speech Recognition, supervised by Victor Zue.[2][3]