M. Alex O. Vasilescu received her education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Toronto. She was a senior fellow at UCLA's Institute of Pure and Applied Math (IPAM) in 2021 and held positions at the MIT Media Lab from 2005–07, at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 2001–05.

In the early 2000s, Vasilescu pioneered the tensor algebraic framework for computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. She addressed causal inference questions by framing computer graphics and computer vision problems as multilinear tensor problems, and demonstrated how the causal factors of data formation could be algorithmically disentangled. Causal inference in a tensor framework facilitates the analysis, recognition, synthesis, and interpretability of sensory data. The development of the tensor framework has been spearheaded with premier papers, such as: Human Motion Signatures (2001), TensorFaces (2002), Multilinear Independent Component Analysis (2005), TensorTextures (2004), and Multilinear Projection for Recognition (2007, 2011).

Vasilescu’s work was featured on the cover of Computer World Canada (currently, IT World Canada), and in articles in the New York Times, Washington Times, etc. MIT's Technology Review named her as TR100 honoree, and the National Academy of Science co-awarded the KeckFutures Initiative Grant.