Mansi received her A.B. in Biological Sciences from Mount Holyoke College. During her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, she studied comparative genomics of early-diverging animal lineages including cnidarians, placozoans, and sponges. During her postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, she collected three banded panther worms from a marine pond in Bermuda and developed them as a new model system for studying regeneration. In 2015, She started her faculty position at Harvard University in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where her research group studies many facets of the biology of panther worms.