She completed a two-year postdoc at the University of Rochester with Jeremy Jamieson, Florian Jaeger and Michael Tanenhaus, in the Center for Language Sciences. She completed her PhD at the University of Memphis with Rick Dale in Cognitive Psychology, with a focus on dyadic communication. She also completed a M.A. at James Madison University in the Psychological Sciences program with Michael D. Hall, in which she focused primarily on the acoustic properties of emotional/affective speech during production and perception. Her B.A. was in general psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.