Her parents, Frederick (Fritz) and Renee Koerner, fled Nazi persecution in 1938, bringing the family to Brighton, Massachusetts.

[4] Wolf’s career started at the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she conducted perceptual research by programming the Memory Test Computer[5] to display dot patterns to human subjects.

After Lincoln Laboratory, Wolf worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman as well as Computer Corporation of America, which was later acquired by Rocket Software.

[7] Wolf’s path to civic engagement and elective office began with participation in the Parent-Teacher Association of the Peabody School in Cambridge, where her sons were students.

In 1981, near the end of her fourth term on the School Committee, she felt that her efforts to bring about social equality would be better spent on the Cambridge City Council.

Wolf led marches and did research to support "economic conversion," trying to convince local companies to convert military-focused enterprises into peace-oriented activities.

She developed Sister City relationships, a model for international cooperation at the grassroots level, with San José Las Flores, Chalatenango, El Salvador and Yerevan, Armenia.

[12] Because of the low rents owner John McAdams was receiving, he was unable to repair several of his apartments on Broadway to make them legally habitable.

[12] Wolf led Cambridge in its opposition to Scheme Z, the widely-criticized proposed interchange for the planned Big Dig highway project.

In the fall of 1996, Wolf successfully ran for a seat on the Massachusetts House of Representatives, defeating Anthony Galluccio in the Democratic Primary by 89 votes.

When faced with barriers to progressive legislation, she identified allies, worked within coalitions, and created strategies to move forward.

Efforts to update the Massachusetts Bottle Bill through a statewide ballot initiative in 2014 were defeated, with more than 70 percent of the voters voting against it.