Following her PhD at Indiana State University, USA with Gary Stuart, she did brief post-doctoral stints with Christopher Wright at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA (1995-1996), and Vladimir Korzh at the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology, Singapore (1997-1998). She started her independent programme as a fellow at the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology, and joined Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory as a group leader in 2002. She relocated her research programme to the University of Warwick in October 2013.