She received her B.S. from The Ohio State University, M.S. from the University of Tennessee at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Ph.D. from the Dept. of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Michigan State University in the laboratory of Norbert E. Kaminski. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Ronald Schwartz at The National Institutes of Health. In 2007, she was appointed tenure-track assistant professor in the Hugh E. Stephenson Jr., MD. Dept. of Surgery and the Dept. of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology in the College of Medicine at the University of Missouri. She mentors undergraduate, graduate, and medical students and postdoctoral scholars in her Laboratory of TGF-β Biology, Epigenetics and Cytokine Regulation (LTEC).