She joined the Caltech faculty in 2009, and prior to that was head of an independent research group at the University of Bremen. She studied biology and mathematics at Caltech as an undergraduate and received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard in 2002. Her central interest is in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying vision. She has received multiple honors including the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award, the Eppendorf and Science International Prize in Neurobiology, Technology Review TR35, Searle Scholar Award, Klingenstein Scholar Award, Merck Scholar Award, Alfred Sloan Fellowship, DARPA Young Faculty Award, McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, NSF CAREER Award, and the NIH Pioneer Award.