Before she joined the Harvard University faculty, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of California- San Francisco and the University of California-Berkeley. Dr. Okechukwu obtained her Doctorate of Science (ScD) from the Harvard School of Public Health and her Masters of Science in Nursing (MSN) and Masters of Public Health (MPH) degrees from the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, respectively. She has a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from the University of Maryland, Baltimore.