She obtained her Ph.D. in 1995 in Neuroosciences at University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France. She did her postdoctoral work with Dr Harald Sontheimer at University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA from 1995 to 2000, studying control and reactive astrocytes in brain slices. She established her independent laboratory in 2000 at Yale University School of Medicine, where she is studying postnatal neurogenesis and neural stem cells, which display astrocytic features and properties.