Born and raised in New York, she left New York for her undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College where she received a BA in Biology. She returned to New York and did research in B-cell biology and CLL before heading back to school to obtain her MD from Stony Brook University School of Medicine. She completed her emergency medicine residency at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in New York City and a medical education fellowship in the department of emergency medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.