A native of Romania, she earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Bucharest in 1993, and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002, under the joint supervision of Donald Burkholder and Marius Junge. Before her appointment in 2009 at the University of Copenhagen, she was an S.E.Warschawski Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego, an Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis, and a Lektor (Associate Professor) at the Southern Denmark University (SDU).