She started her college education at Colby Community College, and then transferred to Colorado State University where she double-majored in Mathematics and Liberal Arts, with an art and history minor. She continued her graduate studies at Colorado State, completing a Master's degree and a PhD in Mathematics. Her research is in the area of geometric and topological data analysis, an area at the intersection of geometry, topology, machine learning, data science, linear algebra, optimization, and computing. She develops and applies data techniques and algorithms to uncover the structure of a wide variety of data sets including biological aggregations, hyperspectral images, and weather data.