She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). She received her Ph.D. (2004) in Computer Science and MSW (1998) in Policy and Management from UNC-CH. She is the founder and co-lead of the Population Informatics Research Group which applies informatics, data science, and computational methods to the increasingly large digital traces available about people to advance public health, social science, and population research by bringing together domain experts and computer science students. Her vision paper on population informatics and social genome was published in the IEEE Computer Special Outlook Issue in January 2014.