She obtained her PhD cum Laude at the University of Utrecht after which she was awarded a Hubble Fellowship, which she took at Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, followed by a combined Einstein and Princeton Lyman Spitzer fellowship, which she took at the Carnegie Observatories and Caltech University, followed by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie reintegration fellowship. IN 2017 she was awarded the 2017 MERAC prize for theoretical astrophysics by the European Astronomical Society.