Barnacka received her PhDs in astronomy from Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, and physics from Paris-Sud University conducting her research at French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in Paris, France. After earning her doctorates, she became a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She received a NASA Einstein Fellowship in 2015, during which she researched the phenomena of gravitational lensing and pioneered techniques for turning gravitational lenses into high-resolution telescopes.