Professor Adve received the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award in 2008, an IBM faculty award in 2005, was named a UIUC University Scholar in 2004, received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1998, an IBM University Partnership award in 1997 and 1998, and a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 1995.

She served on the National Science Foundation's CISE directorate's advisory committee from 2003 to 2005 and served on the expert group to revise the Java memory model from 2001 to 2005. She currently serves on the ACM SIGARCH board of directors.

She received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1993 and 1989 respectively, and the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay in 1987. Before joining Illinois, she was on the faculty at Rice University from 1993 to 1999.