She received her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Tübingen, Germany, spent the following years first as a post-doctoral fellow (1996/7), then as an Assistant Professor (1997-2003) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, before moving to Sweden in 2003. Her interests center around (language-based) software engineering, with particular focus on software libraries and reusable software.