She received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Kansas where she was also a postdoctoral associate. Her research interests range broadly in the areas of development, evolution, and systematics of amphibians. Her research program includes several projects in which she applies information technology to biological questions, including the generation of 3-D digital reconstructions of animal anatomy, the development of predictive models of species distributions, and the use of data-mining techniques to identify character non-independence in phylogenetic data.