She earned her B.A. from Yale in 1992, as a double major in Economics and German. A few years in the private sector, as an Associate in the Boston office of the Boston Consulting Group, convinced her to return to academia and she earned her Ph.D. in biostatistics from UC Berkeley in 2001. She then joined the faculty of UBC and won a Career Investigator Award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. Her main statistical interests are in applied statistics, statistical computing, and data analysis; her work is heavily motivated by problems arising in various genome-scale investigations, such as large-scale studies of genetic interaction.