Since receiving her own degrees (BS and MS from MIT; PhD from Harvard University), she has concentrated most of her efforts on understanding the evolution of habitable environments in the early Earth. Her work has taken to her a variety of remote field localities  from Arctic Canada to Saharan west Africa  but Mars represents her most remote field work yet! On the MSL mission, she works as part of the MARDI-MAHLI-MASTCAM imaging team, and splits her time between planning activities for Curiosity and analyzing the downlinked images and data.