She studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge before gaining her doctorate at the University of Oxford for a thesis on ceramic processing methods for the superconducting material magnesium diboride. Her postdoctoral research at Oxford included projects on ceramic armour and electromagnetic materials, and she was a College Lecturer in Materials Science at St Anne’s College, Oxford from 2009 to 2013. Her current research focuses on the processing of ceramic materials and highly-loaded polymer-ceramic composites for a range of functional and structural applications.