A graduate of the University of Edinburgh where she majored in biological sciences, she was a research assistant in the department of forestry at Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany before going to China to study at Xiamen University and then China Pharmaceutical University. She received her Ph.D. in the history of science from Cambridge University in 1996. The recipient of research scholarships from the British Council/Chinese Government, the European Union Human Mobility Program, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, she has held post-doctoral fellowships awarded by the Wellcome Trust and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Dr. Andrews is the editor (with Andrew R. Cunningham) of Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge: Studies in Imperialism (1997) and the author of The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, which will be published later this year by Cambridge University Press.