Previously, she was a tenured faculty in the Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Madison. From 2005-2007, she was an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Public Health, San Diego State University. She was trained in Health Psychology and received her PhD from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, in 1999. She completed post-graduate studies in Epidemiology at the National School of Public Health, Spain (2000) and received post-doctoral training at San Diego State University, focusing on health promotion, behavioral epidemiology, and community health.