She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship on Virtue Ethics and Confucianism at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 2008. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum and has published multiple papers in applied ethics. She co-directed (with Wade Robison) the 11th International Conference on Ethics Across the Curriculum on "Citizenship and Civility" in 2009.