Lampe-Önnerud considered careers in opera singing and medicine and was offered a scholarship for an 8-year program for a medical doctorate degree but turned it down her senior year of high school. After high school, Lampe-Önnerud accepted a Fulbright scholarship to attend Elmira College in New York. At Elmira college she studied English literature, business, and the sciences while working in a chemistry laboratory as a lab assistant.
With encouragement from her father to pursue a career in a STEM field and her growing interest in the sciences, Lampe-Önnerud returned to Sweden and obtained a BSc in Chemistry and a PhD in inorganic chemistry from Uppsala University in Sweden. In her masters program at Uppsala, Lampe-Önnerud studied copper deposition on semiconductor wafers, and for her PhD she focused on analyzing cathode materials for lithium-polymer batteries while working with a Denmark battery producer, Danionics, who later patented some of the materials Lampe- Önnerud studied.
Lampe-Önnerud then held a postdoctoral appointment at MIT in Cambridge, MA working for Quantum Energy Technologies. This was sponsored by the American Chemical Society.