She graduated in Philosophy from the University of Lisbon (1997) and completed a BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental Studies, University of London in 2000. She completed her doctoral thesis on the subject of chance and determinism in Avicenna and Averroes at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford in 2004. After working as a research assistant at the Martin-Buber-Institut für Judaistik, University of Cologne, she joined the Department of Philosophy at The American University in Cairo in February 2006.