She received her B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and carried out her M.Sc. and Ph.D. research at the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences (IUI) in Eilat. During her M.Sc. research she assessed phytoplankton population dynamics in the Red Sea and found pronounced seasonal succession between the eukaryotic phytoplankton, Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus that was set in motion by deep mixing in winter. During her Ph.D. she studied nitrogen utilization in marine cyanobacteria and developed a gene expression method for assessing the nitrogen status of Synechococcus field populations. She carried out postdoctoral research training at MIT in the USA working on the physiological and evolutionary implications of photosynthesis genes in phages that infect Prochlorococcus.