Helm's academic interests lie in art and nutrition, nutrigenomics, and regulation of metabolism. Helm introduced technology into her curriculum when she participated in Pepperdine's iPad Research Study. She found that the iPad encouraged a great amount of discovery-learning activities and she decided to modify her method of delivering knowledge from lecture-style to group-activity style. Helm earned her doctorate in physiological chemistry from the University of California, Davis and earned an R.D. in clinical nutrition at Texas A&M and a master's of science degree from Cornell University.