Miranda earned her BA from Washington and Lee University with Honors in Sociology & Anthropology and Politics and both her MA and PhD from the University of Maryland's department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.  Throughout her graduate school career, she was involved in numerous grants including:  the use of federal data to study white collar crime, policy preferences, perceptions of crime seriousness, and the relationship between corporate board characteristics and environmental, accounting, and anticompetitive offending. Additional past and current projects include the individual and aggregate-level factors related to reporting crime to the police, the prosecution and sentencing of white-collar crimes for both organizations and individuals, offender decision-making, and the life-course of corporate crime.

Miranda is currently a postdoctoral research in the department, supervised by Dr. Peter Reuter. The project  is part of a collaborative grant with the University of Maryland's medical school and focuses on criminal justice policies and practices related to the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD) among pregnant women under correctional supervision, with a special focus on probation, parole, and pretrial release. 

Her primary research interests include criminal justice processing, decision-making, and both informal and formal sanctioning of both white-collar and traditional offenses.