Originally from Russia, she did her undergraduate studies at the Higher Chemical College of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She got her PhD in inorganic chemistry from Iowa State University under the guidance of Nenad M. Kostić, where she studied interprotein redox reactions. She did postdoctoral studies at Iowa State with Amy H. Andreotti, studying protein–protein interactions that occur during signal transduction using NMR, and at Caltech with Harry B. Gray, where she investigated protein folding. Her independent work at Dartmouth focuses on the interplay between protein conformational dynamics and redox reactivity.