She was an undergraduate double major in Psychology and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied how early life adversity influences psychosocial and biological development in ways that create risk for poor mental and physical health. After completing her pre-doctoral internship in the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Program at Yale-New Haven Hospital, she took a postdoctoral fellowship as a MacArthur Foundation Network Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.