During the 2004-2005 academic year, she was the Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. She earned her B.S. in computer science from Marquette University and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Central Florida. Afterward, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico. Her honors include a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship. Her research interests are in the areas of bioinformatics and high- performance computing.