She went on to major in both fine arts and biology, earning her A.B. in Fine Arts and Biology from Brooklyn College in 1962. She wrote her undergraduate thesis on the Florentine poet Dante, exploring on why he chose to write in the vernacular rather than in Latin.[1][6] After professor Theodore Shedlovsky at Rockefeller University convinced her to take an organic chemistry course, she became interested in both the visual aspects and the intellectual rigor of organic chemistry, and changed her course of study.[5] She received her PhD in Molecular Biology in 1966 from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she worked with J. Thomas August and Jerard Hurwitz on the first RNA-dependent RNA polymerase.[6]