She received her MD at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey and completed an internal medicine residency at North Shore University Hospital. She came to Einstein in 2003 as a clinical fellow in infectious diseases and has focused her work on a murine model of cerebral malaria. She was the first recipient of the IDSA ERF/NFID Colin L. Powell Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship in Tropical Disease Research from the Infectious Diseases Society of America's Education and Research Foundation and the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. Her research is currently focused on detailing the mechanisms leading to blood–brain barrier dysfunction and to persistent cognitive deficits in the experimental cerebral malaria model.