Complex sentence: She was on a leave of absence from the University of Chicago when she was encouraged by her friends to attend a lecture at Xerox PARC in California and had "a heated discussion after the lecture" with Jef Raskin.
Split into simpler sentences: She was on a leave of absence from the University of Chicago when she was encouraged by her friends to attend a lecture at Xerox PARC in California. While there she had "a heated discussion after the lecture" with Jef Raskin.