She started her undergraduate studies at McGill University, and earned her B.A./M.S. (summa cum laude) as well as her Ph.D. from Northwestern University where she held a Presidential Fellowship. Her doctoral studies, focused on optical spectroscopy, were supervised by Richard P. Van Duyne and Laurence D. Marks. Dr. Ringe then became the Gott Research Fellow at Trinity Hall as well as a Newton International Research Fellow (Royal Society) in the Electron Microscopy group in the Materials Science and Metallurgy Department at Cambridge University.