She is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School. She trained in neurology at the Partners Neurology Program of Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital. She was a Veterans Affairs/Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles before joining the faculty at UCSF in 2008. She received an American Academy of Neurology Practice Research Training Fellowship in 2008 and the Fulbright Award in 2009.