She received her bachelor’s degrees in Chemistry and Biology at Goshen College, Goshen Indiana and her doctorate in Structural Biology at Purdue University studying assembly mechanisms of alphaviruses. At the University of California, Irvine, as a post-doctoral scientist she continued her work on RNA viruses focusing on poliovirus and rhinovirus replication mechanisms and virus-host interactions. In pursuit of her passion to understand how viruses interact with their hosts, she then returned to Purdue as a Research Scientist to develop systems biology approaches to study flaviviruses such as dengue and West Nile.