She graduated with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley after enjoying four years in the Champaign-Urbana cornfields as a UIUC undergraduate. In retrospect, it seems significant that she was a biology major for her first two years of college, but finished with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. Her research synthesizes these interdisciplinary interests by focusing on questions at the emerging interface between discrete mathematics and molecular biology. Her work addresses patterns in strings, structural characteristics of trees, and the combinatorics of RNA folding.