She received an M.S. in Biology in 2001 and a Ph.D. in Genetics and Molecular Evolution in 2004 from the University of Bari, Italy. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow and an Assistant Staff Scientist at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI) from 2005-2010. Her postdoctoral research focused on the karyotype evolution in gibbon species (Hylobatidae) in order to uncover factors contributing to genome instability in primates. She led the International Consortium for the Sequencing and Annotation of the gibbon genome whose results were published in Nature in 2014. Besides running her own lab, she is currently Director of the epigenetics consortium for the Knight Cardiovascular Institute at OHSU and the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Unit at the ONPRC.