Egap was born in Athens, Ohio, and went to school in New York City. She started her academic career at Stony Brook University as a philosophy major, but was inspired by her chemistry professor and switched to chemistry. She graduated from Stony Brook University in 2005. She completed her postgraduate studies in 2011 at the University of Washington under the supervision of Samson Jenekhe. Her doctoral work focused on the design and synthesis of organic macromolecules. She examined the structure–property relationships of these macromolecules in next generation electronic devices, including organic field-effect transistors, organic photovoltaics and light-emitting diodes. She investigated how charge carriers and excitons are confined in 0D and 1D nanostructures. This included benzobisthiazole-thiophene copolymers, which can be used for OFETs and OPVs. She worked on oligothiophene-functionalised naphthalene dimide nanowires that can form in solution. Whilst at the University of Washington she developed electron-transport materials for efficient blue phosphorescent OLEDs, using FIrpic and oligoquinolines.
Ahmed joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow with Timothy M. Swager. She was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar between 2011 and 2013. She developed a platform that used polymer nanoparticles for in vivo imaging. She won the Gordon Research Conferences Carl Storm Award in 2013 and a graduate award at the MIT Polymer Day in 2014.