She received her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard in 2004, and in recent years she has been the recipient of fellowships from the DAAD, the Fulbright Commission and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. Her first book, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850, was published in 2012 with the University of Chicago Press. She is currently working on a study of the agricultural sciences in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany, with an emphasis on how the expansion of market-driven forms of agriculture shaped the goals and parameters of agricultural science. As part of this broader project, she is also interested in how learned traditions of natural history and natural philosophy interacted with discourses about agriculture, and in the ways that epistemic authority was secured within these fields.