She received bachelors’ degrees in mathematics and in brain and cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University after working with Bill Newsome, studying how interactions between neurons depend on how animals plan to use the sensory information they encode. Her postdoctoral research with John Maunsell at Harvard Medical School used visual attention as a tool to understand which aspects of a cortical population code are important. She joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 2011.