She earned a B.S. in Chemistry from Valparaiso University, a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Northwestern University working with Lonnie Shea and Teresa Woodruff, and was a post-doctoral fellow in Biological Engineering at MIT in Doug Lauffenburger’s lab. Her lab utilizes tools from systems biology and tissue engineering to determine how variations in protein expression interact with changes in the disease microenvironment to influence cellular phenotypic decisions. She is the recipient of a NSF CAREER award and is an American Cancer Society Research Scholar.