She has received her PhD degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2002 and held post-doctoral fellowships in the Department of Radiology, University of California, San Francisco, the Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo, and the Department of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering, Mayo Clinic, Rochester. She is a specialist in theoretical and computational mechanics, medical image analysis, and has particular interest in modeling brain diseases such as hydrocephalus, Chiari malformations, and brain tumors.