Her parents, Fereshteh and Kamy Moghbeli are originally from the city of Capital in north central Iran and had fled Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and subsequently emigrated to the United States, where they settled in Baldwin, New York. Moghbeli attended Baldwin Senior High School in New York and Advanced Space Academy at the Huntsville Space Camp in Alabama while she was a student. She earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering with information technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and played volleyball, lacrosse, and basketball for the MIT Engineers.