She was a Lewis Rudin Fellow and senior research assistant at the John Jay College Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation Center from 2005 to 2008, when she worked on studies of case processing for domestic violence cases in New York City, sex offenses in New York State, and the evaluation of the Collaborative Family Initiative (CFI). Gipsy received a B.A. in political science from Universidad de Los Andes (Bogota, Colombia), an M.A. in criminal justice from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and she earned the Ph.D. from John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.