She's worked on such diverse subjects as geospatial data modeling, spatial optimization of large public facilities, and agent-based modeling to assess military equipping/readiness. She's particularly interested in the emergence of complex societies and the possibilities of agent-based modeling to understand historical patterns. She received a BA in Anthropology and her MS in Geographic and Cartographic Sciences from George Mason University (with quite a few electives in their Computational Social Science department), and attended SFI's Complex Systems Summer School in 2016.