She completed her doctorate in Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and developed a grammar-based, generate and optimize approach to mechanical design. The dissertation title was "An Implementation Using Grammars of an Abstraction-Based Model of Mechanical Design for Design Optimization and Design Space Characterization." Her B.S. and M.S. degrees were granted by Iowa State University for work in Industrial Engineering with a specialization in queuing theory, the theory of waiting in lines.