She received her B.S. in Biology from Western Kentucky University and Ph.D. in Biology from University of Missouri, where she studied systematics and evolution in plants. She traded in her lab coat and field boots for full-time computational work by joining the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent, at Duke University) as a postdoctoral fellow, where she had the opportunity to refine her skills in data analysis and computational biology. Her current research spans the full breadth of genomic analysis, from populations through deep evolutionary time and humans to non-model systems.