Since receiving her own degrees (BS and MS from MIT; PhD from Harvard University), she has concentrated most of her efforts on understanding the evolution of habitable environments in the early Earth. Her work has taken to her a variety of remote field localities  from Arctic Canada to Saharan west Africa  but Mars represents her most remote field work yet! On the MSL mission, she works as part of the MARDI-MAHLI-MASTCAM imaging team, and splits her time between planning activities for Curiosity and analyzing the downlinked images and data.