She obtained her PhD in Computer Science at University of Kent in 2007, with the thesis "Automatically Evolving Rule Induction Algorithms using Grammar-based Genetic Programming". She holds a MSc in Applied Informatics from the Catholic University of Parana (PUC-PR), and a BSc in Computer Science from the State University of Maringa (UEM). Her main research areas are data mining, machine learning, evolutionary computing and bioinformatics.