She received a Master of Arts in journalism and mass communication from Marshall University, and a doctorate in communication with a concentration in electronic security and privacy from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her dissertation titled, “Privacy Frames: How the Media Write About, Discuss, and Afford Privacy,” develops longitudinal discourse and content analyses of the North American mainstream media framing of privacy in the last century. During her doctoral degree at UIC, Federica received an IGERT fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She also worked as visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen and at the ITU Copenhagen (Denmark).