She has been at the COM for 11 years and is trained as a teacher and biology researcher. She received a Masters in Reproductive Biology and a PhD in Anatomy and Developmental Biology from the University of California at San Francisco. She conducted a postdoc at the Univ. of Utah COM, and later taught for 7 years at a liberal arts college in Illinois (where she taught a Masters course in Sex and Gender) before coming to the Univ. of Arizona.