There, the shortages of laboratory supplies led her to work in computational biology. She completed a master's degree in 1991,[1] and in 1996 completed a doctorate at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Nobosibirsk.[2] Her work at the institute involved the design of synthetic oligonucleotides and, separately, the use of oligopeptide frequency data to classify proteins.[1]