She completed her BS degree in Civil Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo and her MS and PhD degrees in Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After concluding a postdoctoral appointment at Northwestern University in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, she joined the faculty at UT in 2004. Her research interests include various aspects of the presence and activity of microorganisms in natural and engineered systems; she is particularly interested in microbial transformations of inorganic compounds in water, the microbial quality of harvested rainwater, and the effect of nanomaterials on microorganisms in engineered water systems.