She earned her PhD in 2005 from the University of Michigan and then held a Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics post-doctoral fellowship at Penn State prior to joining the faculty at Duke. Her interests include the development of mathematical models to better understand patterns of viral evolution and disease dynamics between and within human hosts. She is further interested in the development and application of statistical approaches to characterize disease spread from viral sequence data. She works primarily on the ‘phylodynamics’ of RNA viruses, most notably influenza and dengue.