She did her undergraduate work at the University of New Hampshire, USA and received a PhD in Biochemistry from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. After postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, she joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in the Department of Medicine. Longitudinal studies by Dr Janet Siliciano demonstrated that because of the extraordinary stability of this reservoir, eradication of HIV-1 infection with antiretroviral therapy alone would never be possible, a finding which led to a fundamental change in the treatment strategy for HIV-1 infection. She also provided the first evidence that in infected individuals, latent HIV-1 genomes were integrated in active cellular genes, a finding which led to a revision in thinking about mechanisms of latency.