She received her Ph.D. from University of California-Davis in 1998, and received her post-doctoral training in the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University (Durham, USA) in functional neuroimaging. Her research centers on the cognitive neuroscience of attention and working memory. Using functional MRI, electroencephalography (EEG), and behavioral measures she has demonstrated that there are two complementary processes that aid “tuning” attention systems to better maintain information over time. There is an active effortful enhancement of neural representations of items that should be maintained in working memory (the memory items), as well as a selective suppression of items that may be very distracting and lead to memory errors.